 
115

### Haywire My Life in the Mines

By Doug Hall

Copyright 2013, 2020, by Doug Hall

Smashwords Edition

Cover picture courtesy marke clinger flickr

* * * * *

For Mom

* * * * *

When things are haywire they are not functioning properly and/or are disorganized. When people are haywire they are erratic or crazy. In my experience and I am sure in the experience of others, the mining industry and frequently the people in it are haywire. The word haywire is used very frequently in the mines.

* * * * *

Table of Contents

Forward

Chapter 1: Father's Story

Chapter 2: Mother's Story

Chapter 3: A Mining Family

Chapter 4: Virginiatown and Bancroft

Chapter 5: Early Days – Bancroft and Manitouwadge

Chapter 6: Early Days - Sudbury - Boulders Above My Head

Chapter 7: Sudbury – The Grizzly

Chapter 8: Sudbury - The Grizzly and Fat Women

Chapter 9: Sudbury –Tons of Muck Above My Head

Chapter 10: Sudbury - The Grizzly - Blasting and the Boys from the East

Chapter 11: Sudbury - The Motor and Transporting Dynamite

Chapter 12: Sudbury - Sleeping Underground and Blasting Heavy

Chapter 13: Sudbury - The Cage and a Friend's Death

Chapter 14: Shoulder Patch

The Story of Gordon Stanley Hall from Hillsburgh Ontario during World War II

Postscript I (June 2009)

Postscript II (April 2010)

Postscript III (PAINTON, ROBERT JAMES Lieutenant)

Postscript IV (March 2015)

Postscript V (January 2018)

Postscript VI

Postscript VII

Postscript VIII

Postscript IX

Postscript X

Postscript XI

Chapter 15: Denouement – Southern Ontario

* * * * *

Pictures

Map of Ontario

Father

Tarzwell

Thomas Hall and Family

Alex Rae

The Cabin at Hough Lake (1)

The Cabin at Hough Lake (2)

The House at Dane

Ronald Rae

Uncle Ron and Uncle Doug

Uncle Hamish

The Author (1966)

The Author (in the early 70's)

The Author (circa 1990)

Shoulder Patch

Forward

Most of the events portrayed in these pages happened forty or more years ago. Many of the people described herein must have passed on by now. Having said that, it is not my goal to cause any problems in anyone's life, so I have changed some names where I have deemed it necessary to hide the identities of the persons involved. I have left other names intact where I have deemed my references to them to be innocuous or complimentary.

In some cases I have referred to accidents and many times to fatal accidents. It is not in any way my intention to bring pain to any person involved in these accidents including any survivor. My goal is to describe the events that happened during the time that I worked in the mines. Perhaps some will learn from these events. Perhaps, somewhere a life will be saved. That is my hope.

I have in various places referred to the ethnicity of various persons. Some may find these references provocative but I consider them to be made in a lighthearted manner and not to be taken seriously. Know that I bear no grudge against any ethnic group.

I had many experiences in the mining industry years ago. I did some stupid things underground and consider myself to be lucky to be alive and lucky to have never killed anyone else. The experiences I will relate are not the experiences of some kind of mining professional but rather just the experiences of an average Joe who went underground when he was eighteen years old and didn't know what he was getting into.

I begin by describing our family and how we arrived in northern Ontario mining country and then describe my own experiences in the mines.

* * * * *

Map of Ontario

Father
Chapter 1: Father's Story

The Hall surname is said to have come into England after the Norman invasion and since the Normans were Vikings it follows that the Halls were of Viking extraction, at least at that time, nearly one thousand years ago. Subsequent to the Norman invasion, the Halls were invited into the border area between England and Scotland where they became one of the main border raider (border reiver) families. A more or less continuous war was fought along the English-Scottish border for over two hundred years ending in the early 1600's only when King James the first of England (King James the Sixth of Scotland) ascended to the throne and determined to put a stop to border raiding using the draconian method of drowning those even suspected of being border raiders.

There were some notable ancestors on father's side of the family. The first to come to Canada came in 1823. He was a man by the name of Jesse Tarzwell who was given a land grant near present day Erin Ontario, because he was a veteran of the English army who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars. Jesse was in the First Foot Regiment (also known as the Royal Scots) and had fought at the Battle of Waterloo. He had been wounded at Waterloo and had a pension from the Royal Chelsea Hospital (the veterans' hospital) in London, England because of his wounds. It is said that Jesse stayed on in the English Army as a Chaplain for a time after he was wounded and eventually immigrated to Canada as a combination (Baptist) Minister and farmer.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that the Royal Scots (Third Battalion) also fought at the battle of Quatre Bras, which took place the day before the Battle of Waterloo. Out of the two battles they had 363 casualties from a strength of 624 or a fifty-eight per cent casualty rate.

After the Napoleonic wars there were a large number of wounded veterans in England, so many in fact that their pensions were a serious drain on the finances of the English government. Consequently the English government came up with a plan to give these ex-soldiers a final payment of one year of pension money and then send them to Canada where they would be given land on which they were to presumably support themselves.

This quickly turned into a fiasco as the land they were given was bush land that had to be cleared; the ex-soldiers were in many cases getting on in years and in many cases they had been quite badly wounded with for example missing limbs. It is also said that many of these ex-soldiers were illiterate and did not realize that they would receive no more pension money after the one year payout. These ex-soldiers quickly fell on the welfare roles of Upper Canada and were not thought of very highly in Upper Canada despite their service during the Napoleonic war.

Fortunately, my ancestor did not quite fall into this category since he had immigrated to the new world under his own initiative rather than as part of this scheme to stop paying pensions to the English soldiers. It was not to be quite that simple however as my ancestor's pension did not immediately follow him to the new world. Rather there are quite a few letters from him in the archives pleading for his pension. It was eventually restarted but he never did receive any back pay.

Another of our ancestors came to Canada about the same time. This was a man named Aaron Wheeler and his family. It is said that the Wheelers were related to British royalty and were quite wealthy when they immigrated to Canada. Unfortunately they had a shipwreck in the St. Lawrence and lost all their wealth and were in the position of having to start over when they arrived in the new world. In 1830, they were also given a land grant in the Erin area for the purpose of establishing a gristmill. Eventually, three Wheeler sisters married three Tarzwell brothers and father is descended from one of those Tarzwell-Wheeler marriages.

One of father's grandfathers (my great grandfather) was a man by the name of Thomas Hall. Thomas was also a veteran of the English Army and had served in the Crimea during the Crimean War. It is said that Thomas contracted dysentery while in the Crimea and at that time many English soldiers were dying of dysentery because of very poor sanitary conditions. Florence Nightingale earned her reputation by cleaning up the hospitals and thereby saving the lives of many British soldiers. Arguably father and I would not have been here, if it were not for Florence Nightingale. It is said that Thomas was Florence Nightingale's mailman in Sevastopol during the Crimean War. I assume this was during a period of convalescence from dysentery. He was a farmer in Canada.

* * * * *

I have taken this excerpt regarding the Crimean War from the internet: "On 28 March 1854 Britain and France declared war on Russia, and for the next two years British, French, Sardinian, and Turkish troops fought against Russians in the Crimean War. The loss of life in the war was colossal; of 1,650 000 soldiers who began the war (of all nations), 900 000 died. The majority of those who perished did not die from wounds; rather they died from diseases brought about by the terrible living conditions which they suffered." (https://understandinguncertainty.org/node/204)

Note that these figures appear to be somewhat in dispute but the death rates were horrific.

* * * * *

Thomas married a woman named Sophia Trott in Canada. She was a member of two loosely connected families called the Toby's and the Trott's. Sophia was only seventeen when she married while Thomas was forty-one. Afterwards the extended Toby and Trott families moved to the United States leaving behind only Sophia because she was already married, and also her brother Will who was by that time a successful business man and the mayor of St. Thomas, Ontario.

My paternal grandmother's maiden name was Susannah Tarzwell. Susannah's father (my great grandfather) had a saw mill in southern Ontario near the town of Erin at a place called Slabtown because of the sawmill and now called Cedar Valley. As a part of his sawmill business, he and his sons followed the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway (later renamed the Ontario Northland Railway) as it went north, building railroad stations and small stores along the way.

The Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway was constructed between 1903 and 1933. I cannot say what years my great grandfather was in the north building railroad stations and stores. However I do know that my great uncle James Tarzwell (Susannah's brother) stayed to run one of these stores - the one built at a location later named Tarzwell. Tarzwell was about fifteen miles south of the gold mining town of Kirkland Lake.

The store at Tarzwell was also a postal station and (great) Uncle Jimmie was the Postmaster. In those days smaller towns frequently adopted the name of the postmaster and so Tarzwell was named after my great uncle, Jimmie Tarzwell.

My father's brother, Uncle Arnold, eventually bought the store, which included some cottages and rather a lot of land on Round Lake behind the store. After the war, father came north and worked for Uncle Arnold for a while in some of his enterprises, which in addition to the store and cottages included mail delivery and a taxi business.

Father's experiences during the war are a story of survival against great odds and I will describe these experiences more completely later (in the chapter entitled, "Shoulder Patch"). And so, through war and family business father came to be in the North where he met mother.

Postscript: Although he did not figure greatly in our immediate family's history (so far as I know) father had another relative who went north. This was William or Bill Shepherdson who went to the New Liskeard area in the early 1900's. My paternal grandmother's maiden name was Tarzwell and her mother's maiden name was Shepherdson. Bill (or William) Shepherdson was father's great uncle. One of Bill Shepherdson's enterprises in the New Liskeard area was a basket factory. The building in which the basket factory was housed was later moved to a location closer to Highway 11 and now houses the town of New Liskeard's museum. Also Shepherdson Road is one of the major thoroughfares of New Liskeard.

* * * * *

Tarzwell

This picture of Tarzwell was likely taken in 1947. The store owned by my Great Uncle Jimmie Tarzwell and later by my Uncle Arnold Hall is in the foreground. Past the store to the right is a garage that had been converted into an apartment building. It is the first home I ever lived although I don't remember living there.

Thomas Hall and Family

This is a picture of Thomas Hall, his wife Sophia (nee Trott) and their family. My grandfather, Stanley Hall is sitting beside his father. Thomas Hall was a veteran of the Crimean War.

Sophia is sitting in the far right of the middle row. Given the difference in age between Sophia and her husband Thomas, she was still fairly young when he passed on. She remarried and curiously she married a man from Guelph, Ontario, who had the exact same name as her deceased husband - Thomas Hall. This new Thomas Hall had also been previously married and as was the custom in those days had had a large family with his first wife. I often think that either by blood or through this second marriage of Sophia's that I am related to quite a few of the Hall's in the area although admittedly Hall is a rather common name.

* * * * *

Father was quite sickly when he was young. In fact, they didn't think he was going to live. Eventually my grandfather took father in to see the doctor and the doctor checked father all over and he finally said that he couldn't find much wrong with father except that for sure his tonsils had to come out. This happened during the Depression and of course there was no such thing as medicare, at that time so my grandfather made a deal with the doctor to take father's tonsils out and the operation was done right then and there in the doctor's office.

Years later in 1950, my grandfather passed away and at that time there was a payout from my grandfather's estate. Father received less money from this payout than his siblings and was later overheard telling mother that he got less money than the others because he had to pay for the tonsil operation. My brother remarked that that was the kind of people they were, "you didn't get anything for nothing".

* * * * *

Father told this story about the Great Depression, "In the fall of 1929, we sold our potatoes off the farm for one dollar for a hundred pound bag. In the fall of 1930 we began selling our potatoes for seventy-five cents a bag but the price quickly collapsed down to five cents a bag. The farmers from all around told us we were crazy to sell our potatoes for five cents a bag and what we should do is dig a pit in the field and put the potatoes in the pit until the spring when the price would surely be up."

"Well" father continued, "we sold all of our potatoes for five cents a bag and in the spring of the year the people in the cities were starving and the government said that they would provide free transportation into the cities for any potatoes the farmers' might have if they would donate their potatoes".

* * * * *

My uncle Norman Orr (husband to father's sister, Ethel) told me one time that during the Depression you could get a good man to work beside you right from morning to night for room and board and $5.00 per month and that $5.00 per month would be just enough to buy his tobacco.
Chapter 2: Mother's Story

Alex Rae

The picture shows my maternal grandfather, Alex Rae in his First World War dress uniform.

* * * * *

My maternal grandparents came from a small town in the north of Scotland called Rogart. They were, of course, Scottish Highlanders or Gaels who are said to have been invaders from Ireland in the fifth century CE. The Highlanders or Gaels spoke Gaelic, a Celtic language. I never heard either of my grandparents speak Gaelic but years ago (probably in the late 1960's) we had a relative visit from Scotland and her and my grandmother began speaking in Gaelic. I was not there at the time but my mother later said that she could not understand a word they were saying.

My maternal grandfather, Alex Rae, was with the Seaforth Highlanders from Scotland in the First World War. Grandfather was lucky during the war as he was sent to the Balkans, and since there was little fighting on the eastern front, he saw very little action. Grandfather, grandmother and my Uncle Hamish immigrated to Canada around 1921. Grandfather and his family were not to escape the Great Depression as easily as he had escaped the Great War.

I stopped in to see my grandparents in the summer of 1974 in King Kirkland where they were then living. I thought I would stay a few hours and ended up staying for ten days. Every morning after breakfast I drank coffee at the back of the house with grandfather and he told me the story of his life. He told me how lucky he had been during the First World War. And he told me about the Great Depression.

Grandfather was born in 1898 and was thirty-five years old in 1933. That was the worst year of the Great Depression, and in that year Grandfather had a wife and four children.

He told this story: "I had a job working at a dairy in Hamilton. And in 1933, another dairy bought the dairy I was working for, and they brought in their own men to run the dairy where I was; so I was out of a job. You couldn't buy a job in 1933. We spent the summer of that year living on the streets of Hamilton (Ontario) and in the fall of the year, I didn't know what to do. But we knew people who had gone north homesteading - eighty acres of land, a dollar an acre, ten dollars down; so I went north and built the cabin at Hough Lake" (which is near Englehart, Ontario).

* * * * *

The Cabin at Hough Lake (1)

This picture was taken in July 1947. Mother, grandmother and a family friend are at the cabin at Hough Lake. Mother is in the middle and pregnant. I was born six weeks after this picture was taken.

The Cabin at Hough Lake (2)

This is a picture of mother holding a team of horses in front of the Cabin at Hough Lake. Mother looks to have been about fifteen or sixteen at the time; so I would guess the picture was taken in 1942 or 1943.

The Cabin looks to have been a going concern at the time this picture was taken - notice the bicycles at the front door, the tar paper roof, the stove-pipe above the roof and what appears to be a wash basin at the far left of the cabin.

The horses were likely used to skid logs out of the bush as they did not farm the land. I don't think they had a barn or anything, so I think the horses were either rented or borrowed.

* * * * *

"We were on welfare at Hough Lake – twenty dollars a month if you didn't work for it and thirty dollars a month if you worked for it; so I went out and worked for the extra ten dollars a month. They had us digging ditches on the (Northern Ontario) claybelt. In the winter it was thirty, maybe forty below zero. The clay was frozen solid. You would dig all day with a pickaxe and a shovel and at the end of the day you would have a hole just big enough to put your feet in. They found out afterwards that the government had made a mistake and the land was no good for agriculture, so it all went back into bush. I wouldn't have minded so much if we were building something for the future of this country."

I remember very well grandfather's words when he said that they lived on the streets of Hamilton during the summer of 1933. However, I was never able to confirm this. I never asked Uncle Hamish or Uncle Ron. Mother was perhaps too young to remember and Uncle Sandy hadn't been born yet. Uncle Doug was perhaps also too young to remember but he did say that he could not remember living on the streets of Hamilton. He added rather abruptly, "We had nothing though." It is possible that Grandfather was speaking figuratively rather than literally when he said they had spent the summer of 1933 living on the streets of Hamilton. Perhaps they were living with friends or relatives. I don't know and there is no one left to ask.

There were about two hundred people living in Hough Lake during the Depression. They were all homesteaders and were all refugees from the Great Depression. There was a combination post office/store, a church and a school. Almost all of the "houses" were log cabins. When the Depression ended people drifted away from Hough Lake. There are still the ruins of some of the settlers' cabins back in the bush but nothing else remains today. Hough Lake is one of the ghost towns of Ontario.

Nowadays work is thought to be five days a week. But it was not always so. I spent some time myself working for employers in the nineteen-sixties where the work week was considered to be six and even seven days a week. Anyway I mention this because I think it was likely that Grandfather had to work six days a week digging ditches in the frozen clay for the extra ten dollars per month. Again there is no one left to ask. Perhaps I shall find some record of this some day. The welfare (or relief as it was known then) of twenty dollars per month if you did not work for it and thirty dollars per month if you worked for it was for a family of seven. Mother told me one time that grandfather worked on the roads during the Great Depression. She was young. I don't think she knew that the family was on "relief' and I don't think she knows to this day.

I have provided pictures of the cabin at Hough Lake. My grandparents, four uncles and my mother lived there from 1933 to 1943.

The door and window of the cabin were missing when the first picture was taken. I asked mother why they were missing and she replied that other people had likely taken them for their cabin. People were incredibly poor during the Great Depression.

Hough Lake is in Northern Ontario (Canada) near the town of Englehart. In the winters the temperatures would have approached -60 degrees Fahrenheit (-51 degrees Celsius) and perhaps even less at times. During the winter -30 degrees Fahrenheit (-35 Celsius) would have occurred regularly.

The cabin was probably not much more than two hundred square feet. It had three rooms. There was a bedroom for my grandparents and a bedroom for my four uncles who slept on two beds. Mother slept in the kitchen and since she slept in the kitchen, it was her duty to get up early every morning and make the fire.

The cabin had rough plank floors and a tarpaper roof. There was no ceiling – just the bare log rafters. They had coal oil lanterns and of course no electricity or modern amenities of any kind. They drew water from an outdoor well. I asked mother if they had a telephone and she replied, "Oh God, no!" Later on there was an outdoor toilet but when they first went there, they went to the bathroom in the bush. Their one prized possession was a wind-up radio that allowed them to get news of the outside world.

Mother recalled that every month grandmother would go into Englehart to go shopping. She was eighty years old when she told this story but her eyes lit up like those of a young child as she recalled that grandmother would return to the cabin at Hough Lake after these shopping trips "with all kinds of wonderful things – like apples and oranges."

Mother was six when they moved into the cabin at Hough Lake and sixteen when they moved out.

When they moved from Hough Lake in 1943 the family moved to a small community near Kirkland Lake called Dane where they lived over the winter of 1943-1944. The house they moved into was quite large and no doubt poorly insulated. Grandfather was away working as a security guard at a mine-site. Uncle Hamish and Uncle Ron were serving in the army. Grandmother, mother and my uncles, Doug and Sandy, who were too young for the war, ended up sleeping in just one room of the house because it was very difficult to keep warm. They felt, however, that they were better off than another family that lived near them because their house had a wooden floor while their neighbours' house had a dirt floor.

They were living at this house in Dane when they received word that Uncle Ron was missing in action after D-day, June 6, 1944. They did not know it at the time but Uncle Ron, who was with the Queen's Own Rifles, had been raked by a machine gun on Juno Beach.

Uncle Ron later told this story: "We were in a landing craft approaching Juno Beach. The seas were rough and most of the men were sick, but I didn't get sick. When the door of the landing craft opened, there were bullets flying everywhere. Men were dropping on either side of me as I started running up the beach. I made it to the bottom of a seawall when suddenly my legs went out from underneath me, and I was lying there on my stomach wondering what had happened. After what seemed like a long time, I managed to turn myself over on my back, and then I could see that I had been shot three times – in the hip, the leg and the arm. After a while I managed to prop myself up against the seawall and I could see a friend of mine propped up further down the seawall. His bottom jaw had been shot off and blood was coming out from where his jaw should have been and falling onto his tunic. I wonder if he lived."

At this point, Uncle Ron stopped and thought for a long time.

Finally, he said, 'No. He must have died. There was too much blood."

On receiving the telegram about Uncle Ron being missing in action, grandmother had a nervous breakdown and mother was taken out of school to care for her. This was done over the objections of her teacher who wanted mother to become a nurse.

They found Uncle Ron in a hospital in England one month after D-day.

Mother never returned to school.

By today's standards this might seem somewhat draconian. It was already June when Uncle Ron went missing. The school year was almost over. In another time under those exceptional circumstances mother may have been granted credit for her school year even though she did not complete the last two or perhaps three weeks of the year. But people lived in a different culture back then. In those tough days of depression and war, schooling was not considered the be-all and end-all that it is considered to be today, and in those days it was more generally accepted that a woman would get married and have children and look after the household while her husband worked. And that is the way mother's life turned out though sometimes my mind wanders and I wonder how it would have turned out if Uncle Ron had not been wounded on D-day and if mother had not been taken out of school to care for grandmother and if mother had become a more "modern" woman with a nursing career. She probably wouldn't have met and married father and likely my siblings and I wouldn't be here.

And so that is how mother arrived in the North and how through Depression and War she had been placed in a position where marrying father and having a family was a favorable proposition.

* * * * *

The House at Dane

This picture shows mother, my uncles Doug and Sandy and a family friend in front of the house at Dane near Kirkland Lake. They were living in this house at Dane when they received word that Uncle Ron was missing in action after D-day June 6, 1944.

* * * * *

Ronald Rae

This is a picture of my uncle Ronald Rae who landed with the Queen's Own Rifles on Juno Beach on D-day.

Uncle Ron and Uncle Doug

This picture shows my Uncles, Ron and Doug. Uncle Ron served during World War II with the Queen's Own Rifles, and had been raked by a machine gun on Juno Beach (Normandy, France) on D-day. Mother said that when the picture was taken Uncle Ron had a body cast under his uniform.

In the background is the house at Tarzwell (or Round Lake). My grandparents purchased this house in 1944. I lived in this house myself for about one year circa 1956. Mother and father were married there and also had their wedding reception there. The house eventually was sold by my grandparents and afterwards burned down. Six lives were lost in the fire.

The old iron bridge over the Blanche River on highway 112 can be seen in the background. It has since been replaced by a newer bridge.

What was once Staple's Store can also be seen in the background past the bridge. I can remember walking down the highway, across the bridge to Staple's many times as a child to get pop and ice cream and other necessities.

Uncle Hamish

Uncle Hamish served as a sapper with the Royal Canadian Engineers during WW II. I regret to say that I don't know more about Uncle Hamish's service - only that he once had the heel of his boot shot off (although he was uninjured) and that he received a shrapnel wound to his neck. They never did take the shrapnel out of his neck and when he passed on and was buried, many years after the war, the shrapnel was still in his neck.

Uncle Doug liked to tell the story about how Uncle Hamish and another fellow went up the coast of British Columbia after the war, pulling teeth for the Indians. Uncle Doug said he kind of figured the way it was, was that Uncle Hamish had the car and the other fellow had the pair of pliers and that they would pull teeth until they had enough money to buy a bottle.

And another story that Uncle Doug found quite humorous was that one time Uncle Hamish got to drinking with a fellow up in Northern British Columbia and the other fellow talked Uncle Hamish into going placer mining for gold with him up in the Yukon. Uncle Hamish gave the fellow all kinds of money to buy mining equipment and never saw him again. It must run in the family because I would admit to losing a few bucks on glory holes myself.

Later Uncle Hamish was an underground miner in British Columbia and he hurt his back mining. "Well", he told me, "I could have been one of those guys that spends the rest of their life fighting with the Workers Compensation Board but I decided to become a cook instead".

Hamish became a cook mostly in diamond drill camps across the north. I often think he saw more of Canada inch by inch than any other man before or since. He also worked as a cook for Shell Oil on the oil rigs off the east coast of Canada and he cooked on barges going down the Mackenzie River. One time he turned up as a cook in the jail in Yellowknife. I can't say if there might be a bit more to that Yellowknife story.

One time Uncle Hamish turned up at a diamond drill site near Creighton which was near Sudbury, and I was living in Sudbury at the time. After having a few drinks with Uncle Hamish in downtown Sudbury I gave him a ride out to Creighton and then down an old railroad bed to the diamond drill site. As we were driving down the old railroad bed, every now and again Uncle Hamish would scream at the top of his lungs, "Stop the car." Well I was, after all, driving on an old railroad bed and I kind of thought maybe Uncle Hamish knew of some obstruction ahead on the railroad bed, so I would slam on the brakes and come to a quick stop. But instead of pointing out an obstruction, Uncle Hamish would pull a bottle of black rum out from under his coat and proffer it to me, screaming, "Have a drink." I politely declined.

I met a fellow down south here one time who came from Kirkland Lake and just in passing I asked him if he had ever met my Uncle Hamish. "Well," the fellow said, "one time I was hitchhiking up in Northern Quebec and this fellow in a half-ton stopped to pick me up."

"What a trip that was." he continued, "We had to stop at every little bar on the side of the road between Northern Quebec and Kirkland Lake". Yeah, that was my Uncle Hamish.

Back in his home territory in Kirkland Lake, Uncle Hamish had the talent of buying houses for a song in Kirkland. They weren't worth much at that time. He bought one house for $2,000 and another one for $3,000. One member of the family still owns one of those homes.

One time I got up to Kirkland Lake and I guess I had been living in southern Ontario too long because I forgot to put a block heater in a new car I had bought. Anyway the car froze solid and there was no way it was going to start. It was Uncle Hamish who rescued me. He had a friend who owned a garage and he towed me to the garage and we put the car inside over night. It started fine the next morning.

Uncle Hamish had a serious streak to him but he was also a big brash man with a big heart and a big sense of humour to match. He was a bit of a favorite Uncle. I think he was only sixty-five when he passed on from pancreatic cancer. I miss him.

* * * * *

As will be pointed out later in "Shoulder Patch" a soldier's pay during WW II was forty dollars per month but half of this money had to be sent home for the support of those on the home front. My maternal grandparents had two sons serving in the armed forces, so they were receiving forty dollars per month in payments. In those days, not long after the Great Depression this was a rather princely sum. It was in part this money that allowed my mother's family to move out of the cabin at Hough Lake and to eventually purchase the home at Round Lake. This money was never returned to my uncles when they came home from the war. On my father's side of the family this money was returned to him when he came home and would have amounted to about $1000.00, again a rather significant sum of money in those days.
Chapter 3: A Mining Family

I spent about five years between 1965 and 1972 working in the mines. Most of that was seven days a week and if it wasn't seven days a week it was always at least six days a week with quite a few twelve hour shifts. I remember going to work with father on a Saturday morning and him looking at me and saying, "Well, you'll make twenty dollars today that a lot of people won't make". Twenty dollars was a fair bit of money back in those days.

Father mined at Kirkland Lake (for gold) Virginiatown (for gold) Elliot Lake (for uranium) Levack (for nickel and copper) Bancroft (for uranium) Manitouwadge (for copper) Sudbury (for nickel and copper) and finally returned to Kirkland Lake. He passed on from lung cancer when he was seventy-six years old. I was walking down the street with him in Kirkland Lake when he told me that I should be filing a Worker's Compensation claim for him. A few days later he was in Sudbury at my brother's and I called him up and told him that I had filed the claim.

Twice the Compensation Board tried to dissuade me from pursuing the claim. There is a rule that Compensation claims must be filed within six months of learning of the reason for the claim and when I filed the claim the woman at the other end said in a very snotty voice, "When did you learn about this." I was well within the six months, so there was no problem really but judging by the tone of her voice her attitude was anything but constructive in my opinion.

And after that I phoned up one time to see how the claim was progressing and a gentleman told me that the claim was held up at that point because it had been filed under uranium mining and because father had spent more time mining gold than uranium it had to be passed over to a gold mining adjudicator. This gentleman then added in a very crafty sounding voice, "Of course, if you want, I could adjudicate the claim based on his uranium mining experience only". I quickly replied, "No, I want the claim adjudicated on all of his mining experience. Maybe you don't know it but a few years ago they found out that the gold mines were also very bad for radon gas". He knew this very well of course and he quickly agreed that the claim would be adjudicated using all of father's mining experience.

As I have said, the gold mines and the uranium mines were both bad for radon gas and we presumed that it was this exposure that had caused his lung cancer. The copper and nickel mines weren't quite so bad but father had spent about forty years in the mines and nearly thirty of those years were in uranium and gold mining.

We won the claim. The Compensation Board said that there was a fifty-six per cent chance that mining had caused his lung cancer and if you are over fifty per cent you win. Father was a brute for work and like I said had spent nearly thirty years just in the gold and uranium mines. I have always thought that the Compensation Board set the bar pretty high so that not too many men got compensation for their occupational exposure to radon gas. At Kirkland Lake there is a monument to those miners who lost their lives in the mines in the Kirkland Lake area and those miners who lost their lives in the mines in the area have their names on the monument. Father's name is not there but I've often thought it should be as his death was at least partially caused by the mines in the Kirkland Lake area. I would imagine that there are lots of names that should be there but aren't. The Compensation Board paid for father's funeral. Mother got a lump sum payment and a monthly pension. At this writing (in 2019) mother is ninety-two years old. Her needs are well looked after by this Compensation Board pension and other smaller pensions.

Although father eventually died from the mines his safety record was pretty good considering he spent nearly forty years in the mines. He hurt his finger once in the mine in Bancroft and was off for a few days. At the same mine, he had a steel snap on him and because of that he was off for a few weeks with a bad back. I don't remember any other incidents. Towards the end of his mining career he did get a pension from the Compensation Board for bad hearing. Pretty much all of the old miners were deaf. Nobody used earplugs back in the old days and the machines (i.e. drills) were pretty loud.

My brother also worked in the mines but his experience was quite different then mine. Where I was working for a contractor and working six and seven days a week, he went to work for a regular mining company and worked five days a week. He had Saturdays and Sundays off while I was still in there working.

As if that wasn't bad enough, I was working quite hard at times doing things like smashing rocks with a sledge hammer on the grizzly but my brother, well he walked into the hiring office at the age of eighteen with a grade twelve education and no experience and declared that he wanted to be in management.

So they gave him a job in the geology department. Now what you must understand is that in the mine they try to maintain a fairly constant grade at the mill which helps them to put in the proper amount of reagents and one thing and another; so my brother's job consisted of going around to the different draw points and estimating the grade of the muck, and based upon his analysis telling the scooptram driver to take so many buckets out of this draw point and so many out of that draw point in order to maintain this constant grade of mill feed. So there I was pounding on rocks with a sledgehammer, working over heights and blasting three times a day while my brother practically had a suit and tie job.

And to top this all off I had grade thirteen and a bit of a university education while he just had his grade twelve. Not much wonder he loved the mines while I moved on. He later became involved in mine health and safety and every year he used to teach the mining engineering students at the local university about mine safety. And of course he was quite happy to let me know how he had become a university professor. Naturally, I was real proud of him and used to tell everybody how he had become a university professor with his grade twelve education while I was there pounding on rocks with a sledge hammer after going to university. There's a lesson in there someplace but damned if I know what it is.
Chapter 4: Early Days - Virginiatown and Bancroft

When father first worked in Kirkland Lake we lived in Chaput-Hughes but I was too young to remember. The first place I remember living in was a duplex on Webster Street in Virginiatown. This was back in the polio scare days and there was a young chap about my age who had polio who lived in the other half of the duplex. Next door to the duplex was a sort of open pond that was a bit of a cesspool. Mother told me once that one of her lady friends used to call it the polio hole. I wasn't supposed to play there but being six or seven years old at the time I sometimes did. I never did get polio.

After a few years in the duplex we moved into a house up on Waite Avenue. The Dunne's and the Anderson's were our next-door neighbours. They both had sons, Terry and Jack, about my age though I wasn't particularly close to them. Years later I ran into Jack briefly in Manitouwadge. I later heard that he became a Captain at Falconbridge but he lost his job when there was a fatality on his shift. I am not saying the fatality was in any way his fault but these things don't look too good on a person's record.

Father worked at the Kerr Addison gold mine in Virginiatown. I was too young to remember very many mining stories from those days but I do remember the story about one chap whose name I think was Lamoureux. He worked at the Kerr Addison but he had bought a bakery and had made plans to quit mining and become a baker. He had given his notice and was walking out after his last day underground when he fell down an ore pass and was killed.

Behind Locke's Hardware Store in downtown Virginiatown (which wasn't very big) there was a tunnel into a rock cliff. I suppose I was about eight or so years old and a chap I knew managed to get a bunch of bullets and he and a bunch of other similarly aged young people took the bullets into the tunnel, put one bullet on top of a rock and then smashed another rock on top of the bullet. Then we would all run like hell as the bullet went off. Fortunately none of us was ever killed or hit by one of these bullets. I can still remember the sound of the bullets zinging around in the tunnel after they went off as we were all running away.

There was another building in downtown Virginiatown that I recall. It was a kind of a long low building that may have been a boarding house. Next to this building there were several vacant lots and in the winter they used to pile snow from the surrounding area on these vacant lots. So one time some of the local children got to tunneling in the snow piles and eventually there was a cave-in. Two or three of the children were killed.

In addition to the gold in the ore at Kerr Addison there was a lot of iron sulfide (pyrite). Sulfur dioxide will bleach the chlorophyll in leaves, so to avoid this, the smelting was done in the winter when there were no leaves on the trees. I can remember being out on the street playing road hockey at times when the sulfur dioxide was so thick one could practically cut it with a knife and it was difficult to draw a breath without coughing.

And I remember being out on the street playing road hockey and this one young person about my age, perhaps seven or eight, had some firecrackers and he was putting these firecrackers in his nose and ears and then lighting the fuse and letting them go off while they were still in these orifices. I've often wondered how this chaps hearing turned out in later years.

I don't have too many other memories of Virginiatown. Father used to take me fishing for minnows along the shore of Larder Lake. There were lots of boathouses there then. I went back years later and the boathouses were all gone. There was no sign that they had ever been there. Up until Grade Three I went to McGarry Public School in Virginiatown. The school was torn down quite a few years ago now.

There was one chap at McGarry that always stuck in my mind. I think his name was Lembit (an Estonian name) but we kids used to call him Limpit which sounded a lot like Lembit and as kids we didn't know any better. So one time I was sitting in class with my legs curled up underneath me so that my toes were a bit past the back of the chair, and seeing this, the kid behind me started pushing on my toes with his feet and as you can imagine this caused me quite a bit of pain. So I turned half around as best I could and said to this kid that if he didn't stop I was going to scream. Well this had the effect of making the kid push even harder on my toes. I think he had some serious psychopathic tendencies and I am sure he spent most of his life in prison. Anyway in desperation I let one heck of a scream out of me whereupon the kid released the pressure on my toes.

My problems were however far from over. Upon hearing the scream the teacher went immediately to her desk and took out this huge black strap which she started waving around in the air and she was saying, "All right who did it?". Now at this point half the class said, "Limpit" and the other half immediately responded, "Doug". The damned class was full of rats. Anyway this went back and forth about a half a dozen times with half the class saying, "Limpit" and the other half saying, "Doug" and when the commotion had finally died down a bit the teacher said, "Was it you, Limpit?" and Limpit of course replied, "No." with a rather befuddled and innocent look on his face whereupon the teacher turned to me and said, "Was it you Doug?". Mind you she was still waving that humungous black strap around and somehow in a very shaky voice I managed to say, "No." and I am sure I was shaking in my boots as well and looked positively guilty. Now I am positive that by this time the teacher knew full well who had done the dirty deed but to her everlasting credit she said, "Don't let it happen again." and put the strap away and went back about her business. For this I am sure she will be rewarded in Heaven where she probably is by now. Anyway the long and short of it is that Limpit had saved me.

And I remember Limpit for another reason as well. During the school year first thing in the morning and after lunch and after every recess as soon as the teacher would say, "Take out your pencils and do... whatever", Limpit's hand would go up and he would say to the teacher, "I lost my pencil". The teacher would invariably mutter some expletives under her breath though I didn't know what an expletive was in those days and give Limpit another pencil. Now this went on for the whole school year until the last day when the teacher told us to clean out our desks and after the cleanup she came around for an inspection and when she got to Limpit's desk she let out what I suspect was another expletive and reached into the drawer of his desk and came out with two large handfuls of pencils. Now judging by the number of times Limpit had asked for another pencil during the school year I suspect there were even more pencils in his desk drawer though I never did look. Anyway, the teacher grabbed Limpit by the scruff of his neck and out the door they went with the teacher dragging poor Limpit along by the scruff of his neck. I suspect she dragged him all the way to the principal's office where no doubt he got the strap. Unfortunately, I was not able to save Limpit as he had saved me.

Many years later, about five hundred miles south of Virginiatown, I ran into Limpit. I was in a store and the salesperson gave me his business card and I recognized his last name which was also a little bit unusual. Well, I said that I had known someone by that name up north and he asked if his name was Limpit or maybe he said Lembit. They always did sound the same to me. Anyway, he said that was him. Limpit had changed his name to something more English sounding, so it was no longer Lembit or Limpit but his last name was the same, so I recognized it. He explained to me that he had worked in the mines up north but that he had lost the grip in his hands. Maybe he had carpal tunnel or maybe white finger disease from the mines. Anyway that's why he was working as a salesperson in a store.

I said that I remembered him from public school and he said that he didn`t even know how to speak English in those days though I don`t remember that he had any accent or anything when he was asking for another pencil.

Sometimes late at night when I have nothing better to do I put the names of people I have known into the computer to see what comes up. I see that Limpit is gone now. He was predeceased by his wife but I saw that Limpit had placed several "In Memoriams" for her on her obituary page professing his forever love before he had also passed on. I am glad Limpit found love in his life.

To return to the mining industry, I read once that in the year 1960 they took more gold out of the Kerr Addison than any other gold mine in the world. Father worked at the Kerr Addison for eight or nine years when in 1956 he got wanderlust and went to work in Elliot Lake. There was no housing in Elliot Lake at the time. I was there once in 1956. It was just mud and some basements sticking up out of the mud. Mom, Kathy, Bruce and I spent about one year living with my grandparents at Round Lake (near Tarzwell). I took the bus in to West End Public School in Chaput-Hughes, another school that was torn down many years ago.

Father didn't stay in Elliot Lake. We ended up briefly living near Sudbury in a place called Azilda while father worked for Falconbridge at the Fecunis Lake mine. We weren't there long when father went on a holiday and while on holiday he met some people from Virginiatown who had left to mine uranium at Bancroft. They talked him into moving to Bancroft, so we were on the move to yet another mining community.

When we moved to Bancroft we first lived on Paudash Lake at a place called White Pine Lodge since there was a shortage of housing in Bancroft. I went to Paudash Public School which was a log cabin schoolhouse on the McGilvary Road. The funny thing about this school was that when I arrived there, there were about forty pupils and they were all girls except for Terry Dunne who had been my next-door neighbour in Virginiatown and who had arrived there shortly before I did. I'd like to have those odds back again. Anyway, we were in Grade Four at the time and Terry and I had a great time building snow forts and organizing the girls into snowball fights and such things. Terry was a nice fellow and a big strong looking guy. He was very popular with the ladies later on I think. He died of a brain tumour in his early twenties.

When we moved to Bancroft from Paudash Lake we lived on Faraday Heights. I went to Bancroft Public School from grades five to eight and then went to North Hastings High School from grades nine to eleven. It seems that I went to a lot of different schools in those days. There were nine altogether before I finished grade thirteen – McGarry Public School in Virginiatown, West End Public School in Chaput-Hughes, Azilda Public School, Paudash Public School, Bancroft Public School, North Hastings High School, Manitouwadge High School, Chelmsford Valley District Composite School and Nickel District Collegiate.

In Bancroft, father worked at the Faraday Uranium Mine. He drilled into the bottom of a lake one time. I didn't ask him how long the steel was but it was likely eight feet. He told me afterwards that the engineers at the mine had no idea how deep the lake was that was above the mine, and that afterwards they had sealed that part of the mine off and had gone a long ways around it. Years later I read in the paper how they had had an accident at the Balmoral Mine in Quebec. The mine had a swamp above it and at one point had a rock fall and the swamp came down into the mine. Three men drowned underground in the swamp water. There could easily have been a similar disaster at the Faraday when father drilled into the bottom of the lake. They were lucky.

Down the street from us there was a family with whom we were kind of friendly. Father and I and he and his son went out fishing together several times. He later drilled into a bootleg (unexploded drill hole) and blasted himself. He lived but they moved away from Bancroft afterwards. I did meet him one time a few years later on though. He had one leg shorter than the other and there were little red and blue pockmarks on his face where the force of the explosion had blasted little bits of rock into his skin.

In Virginiatown my parents had some good friends named Breton. They had also moved to the Bancroft area. Mr. Breton was working at the Bicroft Mine and they were living in the town of Bicroft that later became Cardiff. One time I was coming home from school and I could see mother looking at me out of the bedroom window as I approached the house. From the expression on her face I knew that something really bad had happened. When I got into the house she told me that Mr. Breton had been killed in a mining accident and she wanted me to baby-sit my younger siblings since her and father were going immediately out to Bicroft to visit Mrs. Breton. I heard father telling mother afterwards that Mr. Breton had been killed by a piece of loose. Mrs. Breton moved back to Virginiatown and later remarried.

She married another friend of my parents, a Mr. Armstrong whose wife had died some time previously. Years later my father wanted to give my brother a start in the mines and since the mines in Sudbury were at a low ebb at the time, he got Mr. Armstrong to get my brother a summer job at the Kerr Addison. I'm not sure how Mr. Armstrong and my father became friends but I do know Mr. Armstrong was a veteran as was my father. Many of my parents' friends had some connection to the armed forces during WWII as well as, of course, to the mining industry.

I'm not sure what they used the uranium for that father mined but I rather suspect that a good portion of it made its way into atomic bombs. It seems that father had been a soldier in the Second World War and was now rather involved with the cold war. We stayed in Bancroft for about eight years. By 1964, I guess they had enough uranium for bombs and the uranium market petered out. By this time father was about forty-three years old and he despaired about ever getting another job at his age. But father had had a partner in the drift at the Faraday whose name was Kurt. Kurt had been a soldier in the German army during the Second World War but our two families were very friendly. Kurt got father a job at the Geco mine in Manitouwadge.

I might note here that eventually, Kurt passed away even before father. Apparently one night he told his wife after supper that he was tired and he was going to lay down for a nap. He never woke up. My brother said afterwards he would like to know the cause of Kurt's death, meaning of course that he strongly suspected some mining related cause probably from the Faraday.
Chapter 5: Early Days - Bancroft and Manitouwadge

Before I go on to Manitouwadge, perhaps I will relate just a couple of more memories of Bancroft. There was chap living across the road from us in Bancroft about the same age as I was and whose father was a geologist at the mine. Later on this chap also became a geologist and I recall reading one time how he had sat on the committee that had devised the 43-101 standard for mining exploration. Anyway one day he and I were talking and he showed me a bottle of yellowcake that his father had taken out of the mine and then he asked me if I wanted it. Yellowcake is the purified uranium as it comes out of the mill. Well to a nine or ten year old fellow this yellowcake was a fairly handsome trinket; so I naturally said yes and took the bottle of yellowcake home and put it in my dresser drawer where it remained for the next seven or eight years. Now apparently yellowcake isn't too dangerous as long as you don't take the top of the bottle and breathe some in and I know to this day that I never did that. However, if they had ever run a Geiger counter around my bedroom, I think it may have blown up the machine.

In a similar vein and this has nothing to do with the mining industry but one time I got talking to my High School science teacher about how to make a killing jar for bugs. Well right away he decided to make one up for me. It is made by putting a very generous amount of potassium cyanide in a jar, covering that with a filter and then putting some plaster of Paris on top of the filter. When the plaster of Paris hardens then the jar is ready. Of course, potassium cyanide is a very deadly poison. I never did catch too many bugs with this contraption but it was dandy for chasing flies around on the windows and trapping them in the jar. In a few seconds they would fall over dead. Of course I had enough cyanide in this jar to kill a rather goodly number of people and I have since come to doubt the sanity of my high school science teacher. I wonder now if he was some kind of serial killer who had devised the perfect plan for getting away with murder by just giving his students all the hazardous materials they wanted and then sitting back to wait for the deadly results. When we left Bancroft for Manitouwadge I wanted to get rid of this potential death trap but I was worried that people might pick through our garbage after we moved out and not knowing what this thing was, possibly kill themselves; so I spoke to father about it and we drove out to the dump and buried it there where I hope it remains buried and safe to this day. By today's standards I would guess that that was a poor solution to the problem but remember that this happened over fifty years ago.

And in that vein I may as well describe another of my school experiences. Our science teacher had me perform an experiment in front of the class and during the course of the experiment I upset pretty much a whole beaker of mercury right onto the teacher's desk. I was there in front of the class trying to scoop it back up with my hands and the damn stuff was beading up and running all over the place and my hands were turning black from the mercury. I guess nowadays this would be something of a national emergency. They would likely close down a wing of the school if not the whole school and call in a Hazmat team. Back in those days I don't even remember that we made a particularly good job of cleaning up the spill. My hands had turned a bit black from the mercury and I don't remember washing them afterwards or being told to wash them. Likely the remains of this mess was just left for the night cleaning staff who of course wouldn't have known what was going on or that they were dealing with a hazardous material. It's a darn wonder that any of us ever made it into adulthood. I feel sorry for the science teacher. She spent more time in that classroom than anyone else and so the potential hazard from mercury vapours was worse for her than anyone.

To digress a bit further, the science teacher was a good teacher and I enjoyed her classes and I suppose it is neither here nor there, but I relalize now that she was a mulatta. I don't think anyone realized that in those days. Certainly I didn't and that is the kind of thing that people would have gossiped about especially back then. You must understand that at that time there were very few blacks around. As for myself I had only ever seen one black person before in my life. That was when I was nine years old and living in Azilda and I saw a black woman walking down the street. I admit that, since I had never seen a black person before and I was only nine, I stared at her. Anyway I think I've made my point that there were just so few blacks around at that time that the idea of one our teachers being part black was just too fantastic to contemplate even though her complexion was a bit swarthy. Anyway as I mentioned above, she was a good teacher and a bit of a disciplinarian although I think she had a kind heart. I hope the mercury didn't do her any harm.

I always remember one poor fellow in Bancroft when the school was under construction. Near the school doors there were floor to ceiling openings where windows were going to be installed at a later date and many of the young people got into the habit of going in and out through these openings rather then using the doors which had already been installed.

That lasted until the day the windows were installed and this chap walked into a window, breaking it and he then walked back several feet and screamed, "Let's get out of here" and then ran through a second window breaking it as well. On my walk home from school that night I saw this chap looking rather traumatized pass by in the principal's car, no doubt on the way to see the doctor.

In Public School in Bancroft we had a Safety Patrol that consisted of young people about my age (maybe eleven or twelve or so) help people cross the street at intersections so they wouldn't get run over, and these safety patrol people were even vested with some "powers" in that they could give "tickets" to people who committed infractions such as jaywalking and then there was even a "court" complete with a "judge" that the "criminal" would have to attend and then there were punishments.

So one time after school I was approaching an intersection with two Safety Patrolers in downtown Bancroft to help people cross the street in two different directions since it was a "T" intersection, and I could see that these safety patrollers were having a great time. They had elastic bands across their fingers and they were using these to shoot bobby pins at the other kids and rather than helping these kids cross the street safely they were chasing them across the street willy-nilly so to speak with a great deal of laughter and running etc. So I got chased across the street and when I got across the street unbelievably my father was standing on the other side of the "T" and he was telling me to come to him. Seeing this the young Safety Patroller who just moments before had been shooting bobby pins at me and chasing me across the street, now began to warn me that if I jaywalked by crossing the street to my father he was going to give me a ticket. In the meantime my father, who as I may have mentioned by now was in a commando unit during the war and was not a man to be trifled with, was getting a bit antsy about my hesitation in crossing the street. So cross it I did and true to his word the young safety patroller gave me a ticket and I had to go to "court" over this.

Now the Safety Patroler who had given me the ticket was a big fat kid and didn't seem to have much of a conscience, so I was afraid to speak up and say what was really going on at this intersection, so I was found guilty. The punishment wasn't much. I just had to go around to several different classrooms and recite a bunch of safety slogans in front of the class which I didn't mind doing.

I notice nowadays they have adults who perform this safety patrol function and when I see them I generally think back to this incident of my youth and think it is probably a good idea to have adults do it.

This brings to mind a tragic incident that occurred later after we moved to Manitouwadge. This incident involved a public schoolteacher who seemingly had totally lost control of her class and young students in her classroom were using elastic bands to shoot paper clips at one another. Unfortunately one of these paper clips struck another student in the eye and he ended up losing his eye.

* * * * *

I was seventeen in Manitouwadge. We moved there towards the end of September and arrived during the night. The next morning it was dull and gray with a cold drizzly rain falling. Outside we could see these tall spindly pines that grow in the north country and get to be about thirty or forty feet tall and only about six inches around at the bottom. Mother always remembered how she looked out the window that first morning and cried. The place looked pretty desolate.

Mostly I remember the cold at Manitouwadge. It snowed the first week of October that year and the snow stayed on the ground until the following spring which I don't recall came any too early. I saw it go down to sixty below zero Fahrenheit during the winter and it was thirty below for weeks on end. I worked at the mine over the summer and don't recall going downtown (in Manitouwadge) even one night without wearing what is called up north a summer coat and might be called a spring or fall coat in southern Ontario. I always recall that the last day I worked at the mine, the Friday before the Labour Day weekend, it snowed – wet snow but snow nonetheless. I am sure that I never again saw snow in early September.

That night after it snowed during the day, I had to go out to highway 17 and catch a bus to Sudbury. It was cold and I knew I would have to wait quite a while for the bus; so I wore two suits of long winter underwear. There was a garage there at the highway at a place then known as Manitouwadge Junction. Manitouwadge Junction later became better known as the Hemlo when a huge gold discovery was made there. Anyway they put up with me at the restaurant beside the garage until ten o'clock or so when they closed. The bus came around three in the morning, so I guess I was out there for about five hours in the cold. The two suits of long winter underwear came in pretty handy. The trip to Sudbury was about ten hours as I recall; so we got into Sudbury about one o'clock the next afternoon. My parents had rented a house in Hanmer which was maybe fifteen miles north of Sudbury, so I had to get on yet another bus to get out to Hanmer. Now the funny thing was that after being quite cold at Manitouwadge during the night, it got up to about eighty degrees in Sudbury that afternoon, so my two suits of long winter underwear quickly became a liability. I was pretty sweaty and beat by the time I got to Hanmer.

Father worked for Geco Mines in Manitouwadge and only stayed one year. He always said that Geco paid him good bonus before he moved the family up there but that after the family arrived they cut his bonus. He said they were trying to keep him poor so he couldn't afford to move back out. Father had a rather nasty temper and this didn't sit too well with him so he left for Sudbury in the spring. I was seventeen that year and stayed and worked for Geco over the summer.

I recall that before we started at Geco they gave us a physical. I had a pretty good chuckle about one poor fellow who had more than a few drinks the night before the physical. He was only seventeen like me and therefore he was about four years under the legal drinking age which in those days was twenty-one. Well I guess when the doctor got his blood work back it was completely out of whack. The doctor did ask the chap if he had been drinking the night before but he didn't want to own up to it because he was underage, so the doctor immediately put the poor chap into the hospital until his vital signs got straightened out.

Half way through the summer Geco was taken over by Noranda Mines, so I worked for a month or so for Noranda. We didn't really do anything too dangerous that summer. All I remember is doing things like washing windows and putting brush in piles to be burnt later during the winter. When the big shots from Noranda came to town, they put us all out behind the tailings pond and told us to stay there and didn't give us any work to do. We got suntans and played some football games on the tailings to pass the time. I made $1.50 an hour.

Even though we were being hidden on the tailings and given nothing to do, some of us couldn't keep ourselves out of trouble. At the end of our shift we walked back into the mine on top of a tailings pipe. One night one of the chaps slipped on the pipe and fell and when he fell he hit his head on one of the knuckles on the pipe and knocked his safety glasses off and nearly knocked one of his eyes out.

It was a good summer though. I stayed with the Bisset family, the family of a friend. They were nominally French although I am not entirely sure they could speak French. I never heard them speak French anyway. And when I think back on it now they were perhaps a bit darker skinned than most which sort of makes me think now that they may have been Metis although I didn't think in terms of such distinctions at the time. Regardless they were wonderful people and I had a wonderful summer and I often think back to that summer of my youth. When you are young you don't realize how important these things are but these memories sustain you when you become old. If any of this family ever reads these words and figures out that I am talking about them, know that I thank you and your family from the bottom of my heart for putting up with me that summer.

The Bissets were avid fishermen and I can never remember of doing so much fishing in my entire life as that summer. I don't know where I found the energy now, but frequently after work we were out in the bush fishing and the weekends were pretty much reserved for more fishing. We fished streams and lakes near the Caramat Industrial Road that went north to Hillsport and Long Lac, Nama Creek that was a tributary of the Pic and the stream that comes out of the end of Bear Lake that is a tributary of the Black. And we fished along highway 614 which runs south of Manitouwadge to Highway 17.

It is along this road that I remember a couple of our more memorable fishing trips. It was at a small lake about fifteen or twenty miles south of Manitouwadge. My friend said he knew where there was a boat on the lake and we could "borrow" the boat to go fishing. Now that was fine, except that when we got to the lake the boat had been chained to a tree stump. Well that wasn't much of a challenge to a couple of enterprising young fellows like ourselves as we just inched the boat and chain up until we managed to get to the top of the stump. It was then just a simple matter of throwing the chain over the top of the stump into the boat and we were off fishing.

I suppose my friend and I had been fishing for an hour or two when we suddenly heard an awful lot a crackling and snapping in the bush near the shore of the lake as something large seemed to be moving through the bush. I looked at my friend and he looked at me, and he said, "Shhh, a moose". And so there we were, staring intently at the shoreline of the lake waiting for a moose to appear when a little man popped out on the shore of the lake and screamed, "You damned bastards. Bring my boat back".

Well I looked at my friend and he looked at me and there really wasn't much alternative except to give ourselves up and besides that little man on the shoreline looked mad enough right at that point to swim out to the boat and throw us both overboard without much further ado; so we started paddling into shore without a whole lot of enthusiasm.

When we got there he had calmed down a little bit, I guess seeing as to how we were doing the right thing and giving ourselves up. What made it even worse, for me anyway, was that my sister was a friend of his daughter's (who was a bit of a looker as I recall) and he pretty much knew who I was and so he kind of zeroed in on me because he knew me although I didn't know him from Adam.

Anyway as he was berating us, and my friend and I were looking suitably humble, he repeated several times that if I had asked him for the key to the lock on the chain he would have given it to us. Now this was a little bit silly of course because until he had popped out on the shore of that lake I didn't know the man at all or that he owned the boat, so how would I know it was him that I had to ask for the key. Of course I wasn't about to tell him how silly he was right at that particular moment.

Now as for me I would have been quite happy to let this whole experience go by the wayside but my friend kept bugging me, asking me to phone this guy up and get the key to the boat. "After all", he said, "the guy kept saying that he would give you the key if you asked him". Well that was true but that was assuming that I had asked him for the key before we took matters into our own hands and sort of borrowed the boat - a sequence of events which was of course impossible because as I have said I didn't know he owned the boat until after the fact. I was none too sure that he would be similarly predisposed after the boat had already been "borrowed".

Anyway my friend kept bugging me, so one day I swallowed my pride and screwed up my courage and phoned the chap up and after suitably introducing myself as one of the guys who had stolen his boat I asked him for the key. To my surprise he agreed to give me the key without any further histrionics, and I picked it up a day or so later and my friend and I were off again to fish in the same lake – this time with the permission of the boat owner.

Now this fishing trip also turned out to be somewhat memorable. I remember that we had quite a pleasant day and that we caught about a half dozen or so pickerel and that the biggest one was around three pounds. It was the end of the day that became somewhat memorable.

It was almost dark when we left the lake and we had a fair ways to walk to highway 614 where my friend's father was to pick us up at sundown. By the time we got there with our gear and our fish it was pretty much dark. As I was putting some of our gear down at the side of the road to await my friend's father, I noticed a pair of eyes looking at us through the bushes from about twenty feet away. That was all that could be seen – just two large eyes shining in the darkness through the bush and I might add those eyes appeared to be quite high off the ground. Under his breath and without looking at them, my friend said to me, "There's a pair of eyes there staring at us." And I replied in a low voice and also without looking directly at them, "I see them". To tell you the truth they were a bit hard to miss as they were shining in the darkness.

Now my friend and I were in the position of having to wait for his father there on the side of the road with those eyes staring at us from only about twenty feet away. It never really occurred to me that maybe we should be arming ourselves in some way in case the owner of those eyes decided to attack us instead of just staring. Besides the owner of those eyes might have seen us arming ourselves as being provocative, and that might have precipitated an attack. It sure was creepy though. Anyway my friend's father arrived to pick us up after we were there only a few minutes and I think we were both pretty relieved to get out of there.

Now in the intervening years I have often wondered what those eyes belonged to. I don't want to get too melodramatic here but I have read since then that sasquatches are about seven feet tall and I have to say that the position of those eyes was entirely consistent with something that was standing seven feet off the ground. The only other theory I have ever come up with was the possibility of Canadian lynx that was on a tree limb about seven feet off the ground. The only problem with this theory and I am remembering this from going on fifty years ago but it just seems to me that the growth on the side of the road was more in the nature of brush and that there were no trees there sturdy enough for a Canadian lynx to be climbing. Besides I have spent a fair bit of time in the bush in the North and I have never seen a Canadian lynx, so I suppose them to be a rather shy animal that would leave the area rather than stick around staring. I also don't think there is any possibility that a bear would have stood there on its hind legs looking at us from only twenty feet away. I guess I shall never know for sure. The only thing I can say for certain is that I was never at that little lake either before or since but it certainly provided me with two memorable fishing trips.

There was another somewhat memorable fishing trip. My friend and I were out fishing on Bear Lake near Manitouwadge and we could see what appeared to be a forest fire burning in the distance. My friend said that given the unknown nature or exact location of the fire we should probably call it a day, so we went back into town. It was a forest fire after all and I can't recall now why I went to the fire site but father gave me a ride out there and as it happened they were looking for people to fight the fire, so I stayed and became a firefighter. I didn't do much mind you. I just put a water tank on my back and found a place where there were a lot of burning embers and pretty much just stayed in the same place squirting water on these embers. It was a bit of fun actually and after a few hours I got a ride back into Manitouwadge.

That same day father was going to go on a bit of a holiday out of Manitouwadge but he got stopped by the police on the 614 going out and he was told that no men could leave town until the fire was out. Fortunately for father the fire was declared out a few hours later and he went on his trip.

A few years later a more serious fire broke out in the same area as I had previously fought the forest fire. At that time and when I lived there were only three ways out of town, south down the 614 to highway 17, south down the 614 to the Caramat Industrial Road and on the railroad behind the mine site. Now if the 614 was threatened before or at its intersection with the Caramat Industrial Road then the only other way out was on the railroad, and so it was in this latter fire which occurred around 1975. In that fire all the women and children were loaded into boxcars on the railroad and were just about to leave when word came that the fire was under control.

In the North, if there is a fire the authorities can commandeer pretty much anyone to fight the fire. Some years after this fire in 1975 I took a young woman out a couple of times and she had been on a road trip between Red Lake and southern Ontario during the time of the fire. When she went by the junction of highway 17 and highway 614 into Manitouwadge, she was pulled over by the police and told she was going to fight the fire. Now this woman had a rather bad case of rheumatoid arthritis, so she protested that she really couldn't do very much with her arthritis. The authorities however were not to be deterred as she still had to go with them and she was put to work in food preparation for the fire fighters.

Whenever I mentioned Manitouwadge in the course of conversation with this woman, she would always say rather dryly that she remembered Manitouwadge.

Later in life this woman became a rather famous catwoman with over a hundred cats. I suppose one's life would not be complete if he had not taken out a catlady at least once.

* * * * *

Before I leave Manitouwadge, I should perhaps tell the story of the lady of the night. Actually I found her to be stunningly attractive and I guess I had company in that regard as she was a rather busy lady. There was a pool hall in Manitouwadge that was a bit of a hangout and I recall standing outside the pool hall one day and as soon as the lady of the night would get out of one car, another one with several guys in it would pull up and she was off for anther ride. In the short period I stood there this happened several times. It was payday of course and business was good.

Anyway a year or two after I moved to Sudbury there was an article in the newspaper and I also heard through the grapevine that these people had got a sickness amongst themselves. From what I heard it was so bad that a bunch of them ended up in the hospital and one of the mines in Manitouwadge that had no housing except for a bunkhouse (so a lot of single men worked there) had to close down for a period of time because so many of their men had this sickness.

Years later I was in a lunchroom in a mine in Sudbury nearly five hundred miles from Manitouwadge and without any prompting from me, the conversation turned to this same lady of the night. If my memory serves me right there were eight men in the lunchroom and four or five of them said they had had a business relationship with this particular lady.

Sometimes late at night when I have nothing better to do I will punch the names of those I have known into the computer out of curiosity, and I can see this lady is still alive and presumably well. She was a few years older than me, so she would be approaching eighty years old by now. Having knowledge of her rather notorious past, I am somewhat curious about what she would be like as a near octogenarian but she still lives in the north and I live in the south so it is not likely I will ever see her again.

I often think of the day she walked into the poolroom wearing a pair of tight slacks. She sure looked good. And then there was the other time in the poolroom when she was in an intense conversation with a gentleman. The snippets of conversation I overheard as I walked by went something like this, "I don't want any trouble with your girlfriend". "No, no she's out of town. There won't be any trouble with her". "Well, alright then".
Chapter 6: Early Days - Sudbury - Boulders Above My Head

I had just turned eighteen and was in grade thirteen when we moved to Sudbury in 1965. It was a bit of a rough year in school. We had to write departmental exams that year and not only were the students graded by these departmentals but when all the marks were in they took a class average and depending on how high the class average was the teachers were also graded. Some of the teachers went a little bit ape-shit on their students in order to raise their own standing. I remember the English teacher who gave us memory work until it seemed like we had time for nothing else. I should also mention that the principal of the High School was rumoured to be a bit of a reprobate who hired teachers cast in his own mould and who certainly didn't improve things. I wasn't particularly happy that year at school but I stuck it out to get that almighty education (for all the good that did me).

Anyway as I said I was eighteen when the grade thirteen school year was over and so father took me out to the mine the next day. I don't recall being asked if I wanted to go underground. Father was a miner and I guess like it or not I was going underground as well. I remember I made $2.56 an hour that first summer underground as mine helper.

I still remember going down on the cage the first time. I felt good about it. No fear. I think I sort of felt like I had become a man. One time a few years later I had been away from the mines for a while but I had secured a job underground. In the day or so before I went back underground I was seized by fear. I knew then what I was getting myself into. I managed to steel my nerves and get on with it. After a few days back at it I was okay but I always remember the fear I had that time before I went back under.

My first day underground was pretty uneventful. They put us with an old miner and I think we did a couple of odds and ends sorts of jobs for a while. I seem to remember working on a pipe doing something or other. A small piece of loose fell on my hardhat. The old miner looked quite concerned but it didn't amount to much. That was the only time in five years underground that I had a piece of loose fall on me. Thank goodness it was a small piece. Many miners don't live to tell the tale (if the loose is bigger).

Later that day they put me to work with a crew building a slusher trench. I was helping to build the portion over the railroad tracks. About thirty or forty feet into the slusher trench I could see men moving around through the darkness by the lights on their helmets. When I met father in the car for my ride home that night I found out he had been one of the men that had worked thirty or forty feet away for most of the day.

Father said quite a few curse words on the way home that night. I must say that I had never heard him curse in that way before, so I guess that was just one more piece of evidence that I had passed some rite of manhood. Besides the language used underground is rather salty; so I suppose father thought I would have to get used to it and that perhaps I should be doing a little swearing of my own to fit in.

After that day I kept working on the slusher trenches. The part I worked on was a cement, steel and wood platform that was over the railroad tracks. They would slush muck from boxholes down the trench to the platform. From the platform they would slush the muck through a hole in the platform to railroad cars waiting below. But at this point we were just building the platform.

The top of the drift is called the "back". And generally the back has rock bolts put in it so that loose won't fall from the back and potentially kill someone. I remember working on one slusher trench where the rocks were all broken out around the rock bolts and there were huge boulders hanging from the rock bolts above our heads. None of them ever fell but it did make one think.

One day I was dressing to go underground when father came up to me and he asked me to give him my rubber boots which were pretty much brand new. He explained that his boots had holes in them, that he would buy me a new pair of boots on the way home at the end of the day and that he was working at a job that day where he had to stand in water all day long. And so I gave father my rubber boots that didn't have any holes in them.

What I didn't know was that that day I was going to be working in cement. The cement came to the worksite underground in small railroad cars and when working in cement on the slusher trench job you had to stand in the railroad car in the cement, shovel the cement into a pail and then hand the pail to a chap standing on a plank that was placed across the railroad car. This chap then lifted the cement up to waiting hands up on top of the slusher trench platform. So there I was standing in this cement with holes in my (father's?) rubber boots. Naturally the cement leaked in through the holes. I got first degree burns to both of my feet from the cement (a lime burn) and some of the cement got into my long winter underwear, so I got some second and third degree burns on my arms just for good measure.

They put me on light duty because of this, which was a bit of a farce because I had to work harder on light duty then I did on my regular job. I was helping to timber a raise on light duty and they put me to work carrying five-inch timbers down the drift to the work site. On my regular job at this time they were just making a form for a platform and I would have been just handling little pieces of tongue and groove boards to make the form.

Anyway after a couple of days of this I decided that maybe I had better get in to see a doctor, so off to the Sudbury General Hospital I went. The doctor was none to happy when he saw me as he reckoned that in my condition I should have seen a doctor much earlier. Anyway he put a couple of burn dressing on my feet, told me I couldn't wear heavy boots on my feet (as required for underground work) and told me to come back and see him a few days later. When I went back and he took the burn dressings off and he looked at my feet he muttered the word, "Lucky." I guess I was in some danger of losing my feet to infection.

Anyway when the doctor told me that I couldn't wear heavy boots for a while and therefore couldn't go underground I kind of figured I was on Workers' Compensation and I was looking forward to a little holiday but father talked me into going out to the mine the next morning by saying that they would probably send me home and pay me through the mine rather than see me listed as an accident on the books. And of course father said that they would probably be slighted if I didn't go out to the mine and give them that opportunity at least and besides going on Workers' Compensation was no way to start my mining career as I might want a job there in the future.

And so there I was in father's car that morning going out to the mine to tell them that I couldn't work that day. As we approached the mine there were cars lined up all over the place on the sides of the road and I couldn't figure out what was going on. It turned out that there was a wildcat strike in progress, so there was no way I was going into the mine that day and neither was anyone else. The strike lasted two or three weeks and father advised me not to go on Workers' Compensation which I could have done, so I never did collect Workers' Compensation. One time afterwards, one of the bigwigs in the mine asked me about my "allergy" to cement. I just told him that I was all better. The mining company was a bit rough and tumble and I think father gave me good advice about not going on Workers' Compensation. That was my first time there and all together I got hired on and quit six times at that mining company.

Anyway my feet got better during the first week or so of the strike and without going into it in too much detail, I then got a job on the Canadian National Railroad at a place called Hillsport. Hillsport was in the area south of Long Lac between Long Lac and Manitouwadge, and as luck would have it I had been there the summer before on a fishing trip and I knew there was a nice beach almost right in town. I use the word town rather loosely here. The population of Hillsport was maybe twenty and I might be estimating a bit high there. Believe me there were no streetlights.

Anyway at the end of our first workday I got a bar of soap and a towel for a bath and was heading to the beach when this other guy said, "Where are you going?" I told him I was going to the beach for a bath to which he quickly replied, "I'm coming too." In the end a gang of us went. I was rather proud of this since I was the only one who knew where the beach was or even that there was a beach nearby.

One time as we were working, one of the young guys in our crew saw a girl about our age come out of a cabin on the side of the tracks. This chap shouted out, "There's a girl." and immediately we all took off running towards this girl. When we got to her we formed a circle around her and then it was like nobody knew what to say. Eventually we did make a bit of small talk with her before we returned to our job. She was pretty good looking for the bush with likely more than a little bit of native in her. I never saw her again.

The cook wasn't much good although she probably didn't have a lot to work with. She was a bit of an old hag to tell the truth. She always had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and the half of the cigarette closest to her mouth was always soaked in spit.

One time she made a big pot of soup and the damned soup made us all sick while we were out on the job. Naturally at the next meal nobody would eat the soup and being the smart aleck that I was, I dumped a glass of milk into the soup. I guess the cook saw this as the next evening after supper I was invited to go and have friendly chat with the railroad boss. Nothing much came of this probably because I told him the soup had made us all sick. I heard that later after I had left, they fired the cook and brought in a new one.

The railroad boss was an ok guy I think but a bit of a character too. He must have had one hell of a constitution because he used to chew plug tobacco and smoke White Owl cigars at the same time. Years later when I was living in southern Ontario I ran into a chap who told me that his father was a boss on the railroad and he chewed plug tobacco and smoked White Owl cigars. There could only be one, so a bit of a coincidence there.

I only spent ten days in Hillsport and I have to say I packed quite a few memories into that ten days.. We worked seven days a week, ten to fifteen hours a day shoveling cinders between the railroad ties or tamping cinders under the railroad ties to level them. The rate of pay was $1.47 per hour.

Anyway that was only half of that summer. When the strike was over after a few weeks I went back underground on the slusher trenches.

I will always remember working with one particular French fellow on the slusher trenches. He was a nice enough fellow but a bit haywire. I don't recall that he spoke a lot of English which I guess is neither here nor there. One night we were leaving our work area but we were a wee bit too early to arrive at the station, so we stopped about half way to the station in an area where there was a couple of ten by tens we could sit on to kind of dog it for a while.

I finished a sandwich that I had in my lunchpail while we sat there and then my lunchpail was open there on the ground with a chocolate bar in it. The French fellow started playing a little game where he put his finger on the ten by ten and then swung his axe at his finger only to remove his finger at the last second so that, of course, he didn't chop his finger off.

After he had played this little game for a minute or so he began to try to talk me into putting my finger on the ten by ten so that he could take a whack at it. I refused, and having had some time to think about it since, I must say that I am certain that if I had acquiesced in playing this game of chicken with one of my fingers with this guy, I would almost certainly be without a finger today. Anyway he couldn't talk me into playing chicken with my finger, so he stole the chocolate bar out of my lunch pail and started running down the drift with it, with me chasing him. When he reached the station he climbed up the ladders beside the shaft and I didn't want to follow him up there thinking that that was a little bit dangerous, so he sat up there eating my chocolate bar, laughing all the while. He was an okay guy and it was pretty much in fun, so I didn't mind.

Anyway a year or so later the same guy, near the end of the shift, was guarding a blast on the grizzly at the eight hundred foot level and he was guarding at the station. The cage came while he was guarding and I guess he was in a hurry to get home because he decided to get on the cage and go up to surface and not continue guarding the blast. Unknown to him the Shift Boss was at that very minute climbing up the ladders along the shaft to the eight hundred foot level and when he got to the level he walked into the blast area. The blast went off when he was still some distance away, so he wasn't hurt but he was somewhat perturbed by the fact that he had almost walked into a blast and the fact that there was no guard; so he caught the next cage up to surface and found this chap who had failed to guard a blast and fired him on the spot. Failing to guard a blast is probably the biggest sin one could commit underground, even bigger than drilling within six inches of a bootleg. Anyway at this point I still have all ten of my fingers and I never saw the guy again.

One time while I was working with this chap before he got fired somebody nailed my lunch pail to a ten by ten. It was a little bit hard to pick up at the end of the shift and this was considered to be quite humorous by my co-workers. I wouldn't be very surprised if it was this same fellow who did the nailing. Like I said, he was a bit haywire.

The story about the finger kind of puts me in mind of an uncle of mine who was operating a large shovel in an open pit mine. When he jumped down off the shovel one day his wedding ring got caught on a hook that was near the door of the shovel and ripped all the flesh of his finger. He was left with just the bone sticking out. He said afterwards that he went in to the doctor and the doctor never even gave him any painkillers. He just took out a pair of snippers and snipped the bone off without any further ado. Naturally my uncle lived the rest of his life with one finger missing. They have rules about not wearing rings in the workplace for a reason.

One time I was up on top of a slusher trench and I had to get a five-gallon pail that was encrusted with dried cement down to the railroad tracks bellow. The easiest way to do this was just to drop the pail off the end of the slusher trench and then climb down the ladder unencumbered. The danger of course was that someone might walk under the slusher trench just as I was dropping the pail and be hit by the pail. Well I could see all of my co-workers further down the drift and I couldn't see any lights under the trench, so I decided to chance it. I dropped the pail which as I said was quite heavily encrusted with cement and horror of horrors just as I dropped it, the head construction boss in the mine strode out from under the slusher trench right under the path of the pail. It struck him a glancing blow on the shoulder and he looked up at me startled and said, "What the hell?" After he saw me there and realized what had happened he just kept on going. I never heard another word about it. It was good luck that he wasn't hurt but otherwise it was incredibly bad luck. Who would have ever thought that someone would walk under the platform just as I was dropping a pail over the side? The moral of the story is to never take chances. I should have walked down the ladder with the pail. And never take chances guarding a blast as well. You just never know.

The Author (1966)

The picture shows the author when he was eighteen years old in 1966 at the time of his first Miner's Chest X-ray.

The Author (in the early 70's)

The Author (circa 2015)

Chapter 7: Sudbury - The Grizzly

The following summer I was nineteen. At the start of the summer they put me working with an old man named Abel on the track underground.

He was related to Big Al Szarski in some way. Big Al was a mucker boss at the mine and a bit of a haywire in his day from what I heard although he treated me pretty well and may have done me some good turns which I will probably get to. Al and Abel were Hungarian and I suppose they came out of Europe after the end of WW II or maybe in '56. There was probably an interesting story there but I never thought to ask at the time and Big Al passed on years ago.

Big Al had a son named Al as well. Young Al was a year or two younger than me. I lived in Azilda near Sudbury when I was about nine years old. Big Al and his son lived almost right across the street from us. Everyone called Al's son Peaches, which apparently is an Anglicization of a Hungarian word of endearment. Back in those days not every family had a television and our family did not have a television, so every night after supper I would go over and ask Peaches if he wanted to come out and play. Invariably he asked me in instead to watch his family's television, which was pretty much my objective in the first place.

I ran into Peaches many years later in southern Ontario and he had become a bit of a tough character and he wasn't exactly happy about me telling the other tough guys he hung around with that I knew him under his previous name of Peaches. Peaches was just a darn poor name for a tough guy. Peaches had a brother in Brantford as well who must have been just a toddler back in the days when I was over watching television with him. Anyway the brother got charged with murder in Brantford and was found guilty. It was all over some foolishness involving drugs. I knew the guy who got murdered since he owned a sub shop uptown and I used to drop in for the odd sub. He seemed like an okay guy. The newspaper said that when they found him dead he had a carrot stuck up his ass. It was a rather undignified death.

I don't really know how old Abel was but he was pretty old. When you are nineteen years old almost everyone looks old but Abel was really old, well past what I think most people would consider the normal age of retirement. Abel was one of a couple of characters I knew underground that only had one tooth. I'll get to the other one soon enough. For both of them the only tooth they had left was one top front tooth. I have always wondered what one top front tooth was good for. Anyway Abel never said much probably because he was Hungarian and didn't know a lot of English. He used to work us pretty hard repairing the track in the morning but in the afternoon we pretty much just stood around doing nothing.

So anyway there I was one day working in a gang of guys with Old Abel when the Shift Boss or Captain or some such dignitary came up to us and said, "I need a man with a safety belt to work on the grizzly". Now probably at that point I should have been a bit brighter and taken note of how all the other men in the crew were suddenly looking at the ground or the side of the drift or just about anyplace else except at this chap who needed a man for the grizzly. And to compound things I looked directly at this chap and said, "I've got a safety belt". I noticed then how some of the other men in the crew seemed to relax and some of them even looked the visiting dignitary right in the face as if to say, "Gee I was going to volunteer but that other guy beat me to it". And so that was how I became a grizzlyman.

For the uninitiated perhaps I should explain what a grizzly is. It's basically a steel grating with various sized holes placed over the top of an ore-pass. Usually a scooptram driver but sometimes trammers on the railroad tracks would put rocks of varying sizes (i.e. muck) on top of the grizzly and then the grizzly men would have to put the rocks through the grizzly so that the rocks would be small enough to go through the chutes in the loading pocket down below. The grizzly men would do this using a scaling bar, a sledge hammer or by drilling and blasting the rocks, sometimes after dragging them to the back of the grizzly using a tugger hoist.

There were two grizzlies at the East mine number two shaft, one on the eight hundred foot level and one on the thousand-foot level. Let me explain here that both of these grizzlies had holes that were plenty big enough for a man to fall through although the holes on the eight hundred foot level were bigger especially on the side where the trammers dumped their muck. The distance one could fall if he fell through depended on how high the muck below was at any given time. The maximum distance one could fall from the thousand-foot grizzly was about forty feet to the loading pocket and from the eight-hundred foot grizzly about two hundred feet to the next level and if there was no muck in chains at the level to hold you back another forty feet to the loading pocket. Of course, there wouldn't be much left of you by that time.

On the thousand-foot level grizzly we seldom wore our safety lanyards because it was only forty feet or less to the bottom and we felt kind of safe with only a forty foot drop below us. Mind you, if you had ever fallen down the hole, the scoop tram driver likely would have dumped a few twelve-ton loads of muck on top of you before anybody figured where you were. That is if the fall didn't kill you first.

One time I was working on the thousand-foot grizzly and Jack Foster who was pretty much the head guy in the mine came there because the grizzly was right at the station. I didn't have my safety line on and Jack kept coming over and looking at how high the muck was underneath me. I didn't think much of it at the time but a week later he came back and fired a couple of men who were there working on the grizzly with no safety line on. I guess I had come close to being fired.

Mind you there wasn't any safety training. You were just supposed to know these things and if you weren't smart enough to figure it out, they just fired you, that is if you were lucky enough to survive. I can look back on it now through the prism of time and I realize how foolish it was to be working out there on the grizzly with no safety harness on but I was only nineteen then. It would have been nice if there had been some training.

One time I fell down the hole but it was one of the luckiest days of my life. The grizzly on the thousand foot level had a cement wall on the one side and pieces of muck were always getting jammed between the cement wall and the steel bar on the other side of the hole; so one day I put a scaling bar underneath the piece of muck and stood on the scaling bar with no safety line on to try and pry up the piece of muck to better position it to go down the hole. This was probably not the brightest thing I ever did. Anyway you guessed it: the scaling bar slipped and there was nothing but thin air underneath me. But as I say this was one of my lucky days (and I had a few). I fell down to my upper chest level through the hole and I have to say that it happened so fast that afterwards I was standing there with pretty much just my head sticking up out of the hole wondering what had happened. And to add to my luck, I had landed on a nice flat rock down below. I had broken the belt around my waist that miners use to carry the battery for the lamp on their hats but otherwise I was unscathed. They say that a cat has nine lives. I don't know how many lives I've got but I am sure that I have used up more than nine and I used up quite a few of them in the mines and certainly used one up that day.

This story brings up another one. I was working at this time on the grizzly on the eight hundred foot level. As I said before the holes on this grizzly were bigger especially on the trammer side and the drop below the grizzly was two hundred feet to the next level. There was lots of room to fall through the holes and the first eighty feet was straight down. Now the trammers were supposed to put down their own muck and we had this one trammer called Red MacInnis who continually used to put his muck down without wearing a safety line. And to make matters worse he used to continually do my old trick of putting a scaling bar under the muck and then stand on top of the scaling bar with nothing underneath him except a two hundred foot or so deep hole. Of course as a result of past experience this used to give me the creeps because I knew full well how close to death this guy was. I told him many times not to do that but he wouldn't listen.

To digress for a minute, miners call a drill, a "machine" and the drill rod that fits in the machine is called a "steel". Now on the grizzly we only had to drill short holes to put a half a stick or so of dynamite into the rocks to pop them; so we would take old broken steels, get them down to the right length usually by getting the scoop tram driver to break them off in an old drill hole in the wall of the drift, and then we had to grind them so that a drill bit would fit on the end.

Anyway I was away from the grizzly one time grinding a steel and on the way back to the grizzly I passed Red MacInnis going in the opposite direction. Now as the name suggests Red MacInnis had red hair and he had a bit of a reddish complexion but when I saw him this time he was as white as a ghost. I took one look at him and I said, "You almost fell didn't you". He replied that yes, he had been standing on top of a scaling bar that slipped and that he had almost gone through the hole and that he had managed to catch himself with one arm over the bar. Few people have come closer to death. Neither Red MacInnis nor his partner ever went back on the grizzly again. They just stood aside and let my partner and I put their muck through for them. I was happier doing their work for them than watching them die, so that was all right with me.

The other guy who only had the one tooth was also old and again I think past the age at which most people would retire. Anyway that was Old McCormick. He said he was just working long enough to get a bit of money together to buy a farm up near a place called Iron Bridge which if I remember correctly was somewhere north of Blind River. I don't know who would want to live there but I guess that was where Old McCormick planned on spending his last days on earth and I am sure he is long gone by now. Old McCormick just looked after a couple of us young guys while we spent some time hand mucking the sides of some drifts.

The main reason I remember Old McCormick is because of the time I went to a house party and this young woman at the party leaned up against the wall with a skirt on and her knees up and she had spread her legs like that. Oh don't get me wrong, she was wearing panties and panty hose, so I didn't get to see much, but this was pretty big stuff to a nineteen year old (well, back in those days anyway). So afterwards I went to work and got telling Old McCormick about this experience. Old McCormick just smiled his one-toothed smile and asked me if the girl had smiled at me as she was doing this. I think Old McCormick may have been a man of the world. For a long time afterwards I wondered which part of her anatomy she was supposed to have used to smile at me. I'm getting a bit long in the tooth myself now and have consulted with a couple of women friends concerning this problem, so I think I've got it figured out.

I had my first drink in a hotel as a result of working on the grizzly. I had managed to hitch a ride home with a couple of other chaps but they wanted to stop for a couple of fast beers on the way home, so we stopped at the Belton Hotel. I protested before we went in that I wasn't old enough to be drinking in a hotel but the reply was, "Come on in. If you're man enough to work on that grizzly, then you're man enough to drink with us". So, of course, I went in and had a couple of drafts. The waiter likely knew I wasn't old enough but he didn't say anything.

There are lots more stories from the grizzly and I will get around to some of them. It was a tough, dangerous job. People used to talk about how long they had spent on the grizzly. The longest I ever heard of anybody being there was nine months. I spent six months which was longer than most.

That was also the summer of Expo 67 in Montreal. I was driving into work one morning with father when we were stopped by a Police Officer who told us to take it easy because there was a bad accident up ahead. It turned out that this chap had taken his family to Expo 67 and on the way home had fallen asleep at the wheel and hit a cement abutment. He was within a couple of miles of where he lived when it happened. Father said that was exactly how it would happen, that the chap had likely started to relax when he got close to home and had then fallen asleep. He died in the accident, as did his wife and four children. It was the worst accident for loss of life on the roads in Ontario history at that time.

I remember father telling me that one time he got very sleepy on the way home from work and he had to keep rolling his window up and down as he drove to keep from falling asleep. I can't ever remember being quite that sleepy while I was driving. I do remember though having to pull off the road once between Montreal and Quebec City for a short nap. Of course I had been poisoned the night before. The moral of that story is to never ask a waitress if she can hurry it up a bit when in Montreal (and maybe not anyplace else either).
Chapter 8: Sudbury - The Grizzly and Fat Women

As I said before, the job on the grizzly consisted of using a sledgehammer, scaling bar, a drill, dynamite and a tugger-hoist to put muck down through a steel grating into the hole below. I weighed one hundred and forty pounds when I started on the grizzly. By the end of four months I weighed one hundred and seventy-five pounds and looked a little bit like Charlie Atlas. I could look in the mirror and see these bulging muscles on my chest and arms. Swinging a twelve-pound sledgehammer all day long six or seven days a week and lugging around an eighty-five pound plugger will do that to you.

Every now and then they would give you a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. That was a bit too much – at least for me. You were never quite sure if you were swinging it or if it was swinging you.

One time I went in to the mine looking for a job and when I was there they asked me where my gear was. I told them it was still at home and they looked a little disappointed. I guess they were going to send me underground right then and there. Anyway I got the job all right and it was agreed that I was to start the next morning. But as I was leaving the mine-site the guy who had just hired me came barreling across the yard in his pickup truck, and when he got to me, told me to be down to his house in half and hour to start work. He said that I would be working on his house that day and we would be paid through the mine. I wasn't exactly ecstatic about this as I was looking forward to one last day of freedom before starting work but I didn't have much choice except to comply. Anyway I worked on his house all day and sure enough when payday came I was missing a day's pay. So the next morning in the headframe with all kinds of people waiting to go underground I walked up to the Construction Boss and told him I was short pay. He kind of gave me a look as if he didn't believe me, so I naturally blurted out, "It must be that day that I worked on so-and-so's house". I'm a little bit reticent about using names here even more than forty years later. What I hadn't properly taken stock of before I blurted this out was that one of the engineers who worked for the company under which we were contracting had sidled up to us to see what we were talking about, just as I blurted this out. The Construction Boss gave me an amazed look and the Engineer said, "Oh yeah that goes on the bill, too". And then the Construction Boss said, "Well if you don't get your pay, what are you going to do – go and talk to him?" Naturally I replied to this by saying, "You're damned right I am". When I got up from underground at the end of the shift the Construction Boss was waiting for me in the headframe. He said, "You're going to get paid and whatever you do, don't go and talk to him". I think he repeated something about not going to talk to him several times in a rather stern way. Anyway I got my pay but I suppose I could have been a bit more discreet in talking to the Construction Boss although how did I know that damned engineer was going to sidle up to us just at the critical moment. Anyway this is all to demonstrate that I can be a bit retarded at times. And I'll bet that I got called a few choice words that day.

Actually there were two of us who worked on the boss's house that day. The other chap was a young Nova Scotian who was a mining engineering student although at that point he had never been underground. I guess I took a bit of a shine to him because I talked my parents into giving him room and board for the summer. That shortly gave rise to one of the hairier nights of my short existence. Of course there were a lot of Nova Scotians at the mine and the first day this chap was to stay at my parents' house he talked me into going to a down-east wedding with him.

Well we got to the building where the wedding was to be held but there was a hall upstairs and another hall downstairs and we, of course, went to the wrong hall. The wedding was downstairs and there was a buck-and-doe upstairs. Now when we entered the buck-and-doe my newfound friend bought twelve tickets for drinks and shortly after we arrived we found out we were in the wrong place; so he was in a big hurry to drink these drinks and get to the hall downstairs. Well we drank screwdrivers and I had two of them which since he had bought twelve tickets meant there were ten drinks left. He wanted me to drink more but I politely declined. Anyway my newfound friend then lined up the remaining ten drinks in front of him and quickly gulped them down.

We then proceeded to the wedding in the hall downstairs where we were supposed to be in the first place. I might add that all the top brass in the mine, who were pretty near all Nova Scotians, were in attendance. Now I don't know what happened to my friend when he went to the bar at the wedding, but I know when I went to the bar, I guess the bartender knew me from the mine although I didn't remember him from Adam and he said to me, "What'll it be Hall?" Well I asked for a shot of rye and this bartender promptly splashed what were easily three shots of rye into a glass and handed it to me. Now that was quite a whack of booze for me, so I took it real easy on those three shots of rye. Now I assume here that my newfound friend was treated in a similar fashion and had a triple shot handed to him on top of the ten shots of booze he had rather quickly drank upstairs.

There was a little food court outside the door of the wedding, so after I drank the three shots of rye I went out there and had a coffee to sober up a little and when I was finished the coffee I went back to the wedding and looked in the door and I could see my newfound erstwhile friend chasing an old lady across the dance floor. At that point I decided to go back outside and go for a walk to do a little more sobering up. When I got back to the wedding, one of the head guys in the mine told me that they had got a couple of guys to take "my friend" home.

Now don't forget that just that day I had talked my parents into giving this guy room and board for the summer, so home was my parents' house. I was driving but by that time I had considerably sobered up, so I kind of slowly meandered home thinking all the while that I was really going to get in shit that night. As it turned out the guys who took "my friend" out of the wedding didn't know that he had moved to my parents' house; so they took him to the boarding house where he had previously resided and left him there. The boarding house owner had promptly called the police to remove him and so "my friend" had spent the night in jail. He looked a little sick when he showed up at my parents' house the next afternoon.

Anyway I had a pretty good chuckle to myself about that time because this chap and I would occasionally go out for a few drinks together. As we were having these drinks I frequently told him what a rough job the grizzly was. Of course he agreed with me but it was more the agreement of someone who was just being polite. He didn't really believe me. Later he became my cross-shift and I had the immense satisfaction of sitting there drinking my beer while we were on these outings and listening to him telling other people what a rough job it was. His favorite saying was, "It's brutal. It's brutal." And it surely was. Brutal and dangerous. He found out that I wasn't kidding.

It turned out this chap did kind of like to drink. He often went to the beer parlour after work and then came back to my parents late for supper but wanting something to eat. My mother used to tell him that if he was late for supper he wasn't going to get anything but my grandmother was staying with us at the time and she could always be counted on to make something up to eat for "the poor lad".

One time he was riding on the back of an ore carrier and a piece of muck slipped back against his fingers and crushed all the fingers on his one hand. In fact some of the fingers were nearly cut right off. He went to the doctor and the doctor sewed them up as best he could and then told him that if they started to stink to come back and he would cut them off. So this time when he got back to my parents' he said he was in a lot of pain. I had a mickey of lemon gin there and of course he needed the lemon gin for the pain. If you recognize yourself in these pages, you still owe me a mickey of lemon gin. They never did cut his fingers off.

I always remember one night when this same fellow came up from underground and was wandering around in the headframe complaining to everyone that would listen that someone had stolen twenty dollars from him (which was not an inconsiderable sum in those days). When he complained to the Captain, the Captain told him that was no problem because he could just go back underground and work overtime until he made the money back. I never saw anybody get back on the cage so fast in my life to go back underground although I was thinking that the solution to my friend's problem was less than perfect.

I once had a watch stolen from me at the mine. I left it on the bench when I was showering at the end of my shift. I complained bitterly about someone stealing my watch and refused to buy another one and I kept telling people that the company would have to buy me another watch. I was on the cage at the time and had to do certain things by the clock like bringing the men up at the end of the shift, so I was continually calling the hoistman up to ask him what time it was and I suppose I became a general pain-in-the-ass.

Anyway one time the Underground Superintendent called me into his office and he took this old, decrepit watch out and showed it to me. And as he was showing me the watch he told me that someone had turned this watch in several years previously and that no one had ever claimed it. Then he asked me if the watch was mine. Well this put me into a bit of a predicament because first of all the watch wasn't mine and to top it off I hadn't been anywhere near the mine to lose it several years previously. Now the Underground Superintendent knew this, so to put it bluntly he knew damned well that the watch wasn't mine. So in a state of confusion, I told him the watch wasn't mine and at this the Underground Superintendent put that old, decrepit watch away and I haven't seen it again from that day to this. Afterwards, of course, I realized that the Underground Superintendent would have been happy to give me the watch but he was having a little bit of fun at my expense. I imagine there is some beer hall down in Nova Scotia where they are still laughing at the Ontarian who was too uptight to just say the damn watch was his.

I suppose sooner or later I bought a new watch. Father was ever the practical one and he told me that in the future I should put my watch in my boot when I was showering so I wouldn't forget it. I never forgot another watch.

I remember the first time I ever blasted on the grizzly as I got into a bit of a dither. I was drilling and I can't remember why now, although I probably got tired, but I decided to load some dynamite as I was drilling so I could take a bit of a break. This would be a huge safety problem and something I definitely should not have been doing. Anyway the shift boss who was a guy named Doug Simpson came underground and saw what I was doing. There was a ten-by-ten piece of timber laying nearby, so Doug called me over there and sat me down on one end of the piece of ten-by-ten and he sat on the other end and he said to me, "Look I don't want to have to pick up the pieces of you that are left and put you in a green garbage bag and then have to walk down that drift afterwards to tell your father you are dead, so don't load dynamite and drill at the same time anymore." Despite the fact that I was working over a two hundred foot drop and blasting with dynamite (later on) three times a day that was the only safety training I ever had on that job. I am sure standards would be considerably different nowadays and in fact probably were even in those days except that I was working for a bit of a haywire contractor rather than a regular mining company.

Doug Simpson was a bit of a colourful character himself. I remember one time when I was on the grizzly I was pounding furiously on a rock and was a bit ticked off at the rock when Doug came walking down the drift and yelled out to me, "Pound on that rock, Hall". Well for whatever reason I kind of lost it and I started shaking this twelve pound sledge hammer over my head and I was screaming, "Come back here you son-of-a-bitch and I'll pound your head through those bars." I could hear Doug laughing all the way down the drift afterwards, which under the circumstances was probably the best thing.

Doug had a bit of a curious habit and that was riding around in the mine on top of a skip full of muck. Of course the skip and the cage were side by side in the shaft, so I can't really say why Doug liked to ride around on the skip. He had a nickname because of this habit. People used to call him the ghost rider. I heard through the grape vine that he was warned that he would be fired if he kept this up, as it was a safety hazard. Well Doug didn't get fired for that but a few years later I was in at the mine and wanted to go home early and couldn't get the cage to come, so madder than a hornet I climbed the ladders up eight hundred feet to get to surface. I remember hurling a few choice epithets at the cagetenders when I got there and I remember they just ignored me. Anyway I heard afterwards that Doug Simpson had apparently filed his report for the night and gone home. After he had gone home the hoist had broken down and since there was no shift boss to direct the repairs, the men on the shaft had simply stopped working. The report he had filed quickly became inaccurate. Mr. Simpson was never seen again around that mine.

It was Doug Simpson who asked me one time when I was going to go on a machine (a drill). I told him I wasn't going on any machine. Maybe I shouldn't have been so hasty. I don't know. But I think that rock dust doesn't do a person much good and now I have seen how father died. It is true that the rock in Sudbury had much less silicon in it than in other locales and also that it was much better for radon gas. It is also true that standards are better nowadays and that the ventilation is better. But who knows?

There were quite a few characters besides Doug Simpson around the mines. One chap I shall always remember was Big Pete the Finlander. Here was a man that, believe it or not, had chopped off all of his fingers and both thumbs for the Compensation money. His fingers and thumbs were chopped off even with his palms except that on his one "hand'" he had just enough of a stub of his thumb left that he could hold a cigarette between the stub and his palm. Big Pete used to tell people that he couldn't afford a holiday unless he chopped off a finger or thumb for the Compensation money.

I often used to see Big Pete waiting for the cage at the station at the end of the shift. I never spoke to him though, not even once, but I often used to look at him, wondering what kind of man would be crazy enough to cut off all his fingers for the Compensation money.

Another memorable chap was a guy named McIver. He always seemed to be rushing around in a bit of a dither and was soon christened, "Driver McIver".

Still another chap who was somewhat of a character was a guy we called "Pedro". I was there when "Pedro" worked his first day underground and he called everybody else Pedro, so naturally we started calling him Pedro. The name stuck. He worked around the mine for years and everybody called him Pedro all that time. He told me his real name one time. I think it was Don but I forget.

Another somewhat memorable chap was a guy whose name I seem to recall was Joe. I think he was Polish and his English wasn't the best. He had the habit of frequently saying, "sumumagum". One day I got a piece of chalk and I asked him to write "sumumagum" on the side of the drift. He spelled it exactly the same way he pronounced it.

And now I shall relate a story about an accident in which I was involved under ground. I am not particularly happy with myself over this but you understand that some of the partners you got underground were a bit scrappy and I was in the position of just starting underground not knowing much myself. Anyway this chap was a guy who had previously worked for Inco and from what I heard he had walked out of his place of work one day with some blasting caps in his pants pocket. This is not the brightest thing to do since the slightest bump and indeed just body heat can set of a blasting cap. Dynamite is fairly stable but don't trust the blasting caps. Anyway as I said this guy had walked out of his place of work with one or more blasting caps in his pocket and it or they had, from what I heard, blown up in his pocket as he was walking out of the place. He was quite badly injured and had been promptly fired for his stupidity.

Anyway the company for which I worked then hired this chap and he became my partner on the one thousand foot level grizzly at the North Mine. As I have previously said we used a tugger hoist to drag the large rocks to the back of the grizzly so that we could drill and blast them later and since the rocks thus blasted had no place to go there got to be a bit of hill at the back of the grizzly which tapered off down to the grizzly itself. So one day between this partner and myself we put a cable around this very large rock and dragged it off the grizzly and up the hill behind the grizzly. Now I could see that there was no way this rock was going to stay where it was near the top of this hill but I thought that I could use a scaling bar to put the rock behind another one and I felt that that would keep it there. The cable was still wrapped around the rock and it was already partly behind the other rock and besides I was pretty sure I could lever this rock into a safe position; so I felt that it was safe enough to perform this operation. But it was not to be. As soon as I touched the rock with the scaling bar it jumped out of the cable and also out from behind the other rock and started rolling down the hill. To my horror I turned and saw that my partner was nonchalantly walking down the hill with his back turned to this large rock that was rolling down the hill after him. Thank God the rock never hit him directly. There was a cement abutment at the side of the grizzly and the rock slammed into the cement abutment before it rolled over and hit him breaking his leg. They tried to train him as a scooptram driver afterwards as a light duty job but he wasn't very good at it and he eventually quit or probably went off on Compensation. I'm not very happy with my roll in this but a man has to look after his own safety too and that hill was an obvious safety hazard and I think most thinking people would have made damn sure that rock was stable before they turned around and started nonchalantly walking down a hill with the rock behind them. The Captain came down after the accident and he said to me, "You could have killed him." I said, "I know." And that was the last I ever heard about the matter.

There was a fair bit of drinking around the mines in those days. I remember one time the whole mucking crew, maybe ten or so men left the mine in full mining gear with oilers (rainsuits) on and lights on their helmets to go to the Belton Hotel in Sudbury for a drink. Also, the head guy at the mine (not John Foster) was rumoured to be an alcoholic and one time his brother started at the mine. He came in to work a few days so drunk he was pretty much passed out. We used to take him underground and put him to sleep on a bench at the station.

One time I spent the day working on surface cleaning up some material in a garbage dump with a couple of other fellows. Near the end of the day the job was finished and they told me they had to go into town on a job and I could not accompany them; so they left me in a warehouse on the mine-site twiddling my thumbs. And that's where I was when the head guy in the mine walked in. Well I was kind of off in a corner and I don't think he saw me when he came in but I thought, "What if he comes over here and finds me and thinks I am hiding?" Of course I sort of was hiding but not by my choice. Anyway, I decided I should just make a clean breast of it and I went out where he could see me. And when he saw me he said, "Take a bag of that cement and put it in the back of my truck". So I did what he said and then he took off without saying anything more to me. Anyway I've often wondered what those two guys had to do in town that they couldn't take me with them and I finally came to the conclusion that they were going into town for a couple of drinks before the shift ended and didn't want me with them for fear of rumours starting and such.

And then one time when I was on the cage I had a partner who liked to drink. At that time I was driving into work with a guy named Blackjack MacDougal. On the graveyard shift, we actually had to pick this partner up at the hotel on the way in to work, and Blackjack used to like to egg this chap on. He was already half lit but Blackjack would always make sure that he had a few more quick ones before we headed in to the mine. Of course he was my partner not Blackjack's. Thankfully all we did on the cage on the graveyard shift was skip muck and one man could pretty much do that by himself as long as the muck was good. So this partner used to like to snuggle up nice and close to me in the space between the two chutes in the loading pocket and get his face right up into mine and start singing, "My Darling Clementine". This would go on for fifteen or twenty minutes when in exasperation I would send him over to the other side of the chute to go to sleep. Blackjack who came by his nickname because his name was Jack and he had a rather heavy five o'clock shadow thought this was highly amusing.

To digress here I must say it was a different kettle of fish when Blackjack arrived at my parents' house one day to go to work and my father was leaving at the same time. So I offered father a ride into work with us. Now father had been in a commando unit during WW II and he was sort of like the Sergeant-Major and a bit of a dour character rolled into one and some times he could be dour in the extreme. Anyway like I said Blackjack was a guy who liked to joke around quite a bit but when father got into the car that day it was just like a heavy sheet of ice had descended upon the car. Blackjack sure didn't do any joking around that day on the way into work and if I asked him, I am sure that he would remember that ride into work to this day.

Having made one digression I suppose I may as well make another. On time when I was working on the cage I had a partner that I used to drive into work and we had to drive though downtown Sudbury to get to work. Now the funny thing about this is that this guy was fairly expressive and he liked fat women. If there was a nice looking woman walking down the street who was sort of like the Hollywood ideal of beauty there would be no reaction out of this fellow but if a fat woman was walking down the street (and I do mean quite an obese woman) than he would have his head right out the car window screaming and hollering at her like she was the most beautiful woman in the world. For the most part these women appeared baffled by this. And as a person who likes the less endowed ladies I have to say that I was passingly baffled myself. Having said that, I always thought that when a man was born liking fat women that it was sort of like being born with a million dollars in his pocket. That is to say that in my observation there never seems to be too much of a shortage of fat women around, so I can't see any reason that a man who likes fat women should ever lack for female companionship and he should be able to have his pick of fat women with nice personalities. It could be that my perceptions are warped here. I mean a man who likes fat women may feel that there are far too many skinny ones around.

Well I wanted to get around to telling you about this one partner I had on the grizzly on the eight hundred foot level of the East mine in Sudbury but I have digressed too far and have run out of time; so I will have to pick up the tale at a later date.
Chapter 9: Sudbury –Tons of Muck Above My Head

Well as I said before I'm trying to get around to this one partner I had on the grizzly but thinking about Blackjack MacDougal has brought back another old memory.

One time I was driving in to work with Blackjack when Blackjack spotted an ambulance sitting in front of the office building. He said to me somewhat vacantly, "I wonder what that ambulance is doing sitting there in front of the office." And then he added quickly, "Oh, oh, somebody got it today. I wonder who it was." I said, "No, no one died." Blackjack replied with an emphatic, "Yes!"

A mechanic was working with another fellow in the loading pocket doing some riveting at the bottom of the pocket. They needed an air supply for the riveting gun and had managed to hook up the air supply in such a way that when the air to the riveting gun was turned on, a set of chains would lift sending rocks down the chute to the bottom of the pocket. At the same time they had disabled the air supply to the cylinder that was supposed to stop the rocks from going down the chute to the bottom of the pocket. Apparently they never stopped to test this arrangement before the one chap went down to the bottom of the pocket to do the riveting. When his partner turned the air on for the riveting gun the muck poured down the chute into the pocket and there was no way to turn it off. They said that the man tried to climb the ladder back out of the pocket but that a large piece of muck had hit him in the neck and he had succumbed.

We never went underground for four hours that day as they sorted things out. The Captain came and asked me if I had a set of oilers (a rainsuit). Apparently it was wet where the chap had died, so they were looking for people with oilers to help dig him out of the muck. I had a set of oilers, so they told me to go and get them. I did but I was none too keen about digging this dead guy out of the muck, so when I got back to the headframe I put the oilers over on one side of the headframe and I went and sat on the other side hoping that they would forget that I owned a set of oilers. In the end they found out the guy wasn't buried as deep as they thought, so they didn't need extra help to dig him out.

I was working on the ho ram on the eight hundred foot grizzly at the time and a few days after the accident the partner of the man who had been killed came down to do some welding on the grizzly there. I didn't even know he was coming but he immediately lit into me about why the grizzly hadn't been cleaned off for him. He was a German fellow and a bit autocratic and bossy sounding, which kind of rubbed me the wrong way; so in no time he had my dander up. Anyway I just put the tip of the ho ram down on the grizzly and vibrated the hell out of it in order to clean it off. Afterwards this chap went out on the grizzly to inspect my cleaning job and at that point I was still angry and I started moving the boom of the ho ram towards him very rapidly. Mind you I pretty much knew exactly what I was doing as the ho ram would stop on a dime. Anyway he ran of the grizzly with a few choice words though he didn't say anything directly to me. I don't ever recall that he did any welding on the grizzly and I never saw him again, so I am sure that he quit soon afterwards if not the same day. I doubt if many tears were shed when he left.

The partner I had on the grizzly was just a young fellow. I was twenty that year and he was perhaps a year younger than me. The first day he was supposed to start working with me he never arrived. The road to the mine-site was a crooked winding road. At one point there was a railroad overpass and under the railroad overpass there was a ninety-degree turn in the road. At another spot there was a bridge and the bridge wasn't totally lined up with the road. Anyway on his supposed first day into work this chap was driving a motorcycle on this highway and when he got to the place where the bridge wasn't totally aligned with the road he went on one side of the bridge and the motorcycle went on the other side.

One time later I was hitchhiking out to work along this road and who should come along but my partner on his motorcycle. He stopped for me and I wasn't too sure about the situation but I hopped on the back of the bike. What followed was a hair-raising ride out to the mine. As this ride progressed I was looking over my benefactors shoulder and I could see a dial on the bike that was bouncing around between sixty and sixty-five. When we got to the mine I got off the back of the bike and I was shaking a little bit which I didn't want my partner to see. At this point he said to me, "I hope you weren't disappointed". I replied, "Well we weren't going that fast anyway." And he said, "What makes you think that?" And I said, "I was looking at that dial there over your shoulder and we were only going sixty to sixty-five miles per hour." He replied to this that the dial I had been watching was the tachometer and that we had been going ninety to ninety-five miles per hour (on a crooked winding road).

I didn't like the guy much. He was a bit of a smart-ass. There was always a running water hose beside the grizzly. One time he shoved the water hose in to my rubber boot. He seemed to think this was funny but I didn't see the humour. We nearly got into a fight just a few feet from the two hundred foot deep hole.

Now one thing you must understand is that underground your life can very easily depend on your partner. And regarding the grizzly you must understand that when a scooptram dumps and there are already rocks on the grizzly, a lot of rocks that would otherwise go down quite easily get hung up around the rocks on the grizzly and the job just becomes that much harder. As a result the grizzlymen will work pretty hard to get all the rocks down before the scooptram comes back and dumps again. Now the scooptram driver in my opinion should not approach the grizzly while the grizzlyman is still on it because he is then in the position of having a twelve ton bucket of muck over top of the grizzlyman's head if the grizzly man doesn't move off as he might not do if he is intent on getting muck down before the next dump. And that was the situation I was in one day with this partner. I was intent on getting a rock down before the next dump but the scooptram driver was in a hurry and came in to dump, so as I was trying to put this rock down I had a twelve-ton load of rocks above my head. My partner waved his light signaling the scooptram driver not to dump. He told me afterwards that he considered not doing anything seeing as to how we weren't on good terms but he finally decided to do the right thing. I guess I used up another one of my lives there and that was not the only time I had a twelve ton bucket of muck above my head. The other time was probably even scarier. I'll get to it later.

There was another fatality at the mine one time. They brought in a new type of hydraulic hose that could be just turned a half turn to snap into place. The old ones had to be screwed into place. Anyway the scooptram driver came out to the station with a full load of muck and these new hydraulic hoses were leaking; so he hoisted the bucket up and then went underneath the bucket to try and do a better job of connecting the hydraulic hoses. At this point one of these hydraulic hoses popped out and the full load of muck came down on top of him. He was, of course, crushed and killed.

Chapter 10: Sudbury - The Grizzly - Blasting and the Boys from the East

This particular partner on the grizzly figured in a couple of other incidents I had while working in the mines.

Once he and I were blasting on the grizzly. When the dynamite was loaded there were two directions in which the blast had to be guarded. We were just a couple of hundred feet or so from the shaft, so obviously the station had to be guarded. There was only one drift leading to the station but in the other direction there three drifts converging on the drift that led to the grizzly. Figuring that this drift might be a bit harder to guard although this was not a particularly hard job, I took this drift to guard while I sent my partner to guard the station. The next thing I had to do was light the fuse and although we were not supposed to do this the fuse was generally cut quite short. A tape fuse (at least in those days) burned at about forty seconds to the foot. Generally we cut the fuses to five or six inches so they went off in about fifteen to twenty seconds. Anyway this time I lit the fuse and went around the corner to guard the blast. I had no sooner than rounded the corner than I heard a blast. I thought it was too soon for our blast to go off and I knew that some men were blasting in the boxholes further down the drift, so I very cautiously peeked around the corner to see what was going on. When I did so, I could see my partner nonchalantly walking back into the blast area. It still didn't seem to me that our blast had gone off but wondering what the heck my partner was doing I started to edge forward towards the blast area. Finally our blast went off. A large rock flipped out of the blast area and brushed my left hip. Everything was covered in smoke from the blast but through the smoke I could see my partner's light writhing around on the ground. My partner had been about fifty feet away from the blast and in a direct line to it. I ran up through the smoke and when I got to my partner I could see that he was standing up seemingly all right and his light was writhing around on the ground because he was picking up his hardhat and light with the lampcord. I asked him about this later and he said that the concussion from the blast had blown the hardhat off his head. Anyway as I think I have mentioned before this partner was a chap I didn't particularly care for but when I saw he was all right I threw my arms around him and I was shouting, "You're okay. You're okay." Later I asked him why he had walked into the blast area and he said that he had heard the other blast (as I had) and had seen me as I was peeking out around the corner, so he thought everything was okay. Of course he didn't see or smell the smoke from the blast, which would have come in his direction seeing as to how he was guarding at the shaft, and he was using no caution whatsoever. Not good enough, I think. He was lucky.

There was another incident I often think about regarding hardhats being blown off by the blasts. They frequently used to come and get me to guard when they were blasting in the boxholes on the level and these blasts were very strong. I didn't much care for this job. I would stand there guarding with four fingers on both hands holding my hardhat down on my head and my thumbs in my ears to protect my eardrums from the blast. I would hear the blast when it went off, and then I could see the dust in the air in front of me alternately compressing and expanding as the shockwave approached. Finally the shockwave would hit. Invariably, even though I was holding my hard hat down on my head and it was attached by a lampcord to the battery on the belt at my waist, the hard hat would blow off my head and afterwards I would have to go looking for it.

Well as I said I didn't much care for this job, so one time when they came to ask me to guard I was all too happy to be in conversation with a miner who had dropped by because he was waiting for a machine in the machine shop around the corner. I asked him if he would mind going to guard the blast for me. Of course just in case he might change his mind about guarding the blast I neglected to tell him how strong these blasts were. He had some rather choice epithets for me when he came back after the blast. Of course his hard hat had blown off and he had had to go looking for it but the part that I always found amusing was that when the concussion had hit, he had been smoking a cigarette and the concussion had blown the cigarette right out of his mouth.

The partner I mentioned above figured in one other incident at that time. As I said before the holes on the grizzly were plenty big enough to fall through. Also as the scooptram driver continued to dump muck, the space behind the grizzly filled with large rocks and finally the grizzly itself became progressively covered by large rocks although generally there were still plenty of open spaces through which to fall. Anyway this was the case one time when I went out on the grizzly with a plugger (a drill) to drill some rocks for blasting. Now as it happened the right side of the grizzly was covered with rocks all the way up to the front of the grizzly, and when I got up there my safety line was just a wee bit too short to allow me to reach a couple of rocks up at the far end, so I looked around and saw that there was virtually no chance to fall through since there were lots of rocks covering the grizzly in my immediate vicinity although certainly the whole grizzly was not covered. Accordingly I unsnapped my safety line to get those last couple of rocks on the right hand side. When I finished this task I shall admit right here and now that I plain and plumb forgot that I had taken off my safety line. Not only that, but there were still a bunch of rocks to be drilled over on the trammer side of the grizzly.

Now I think that I have mentioned before that the holes on the trammer side of the grizzly were quite a bit larger than on the other side and not only that but the steel bars that the grizzly had been made of were quite a bit smaller there, meaning that a person had quite a lot less to stand on in addition to the holes being larger. And don't forget that it was potentially two hundred feet to the bottom and the first eighty feet was straight down. Anyway I set out for the trammer side of the grizzly across the open holes of the regular grizzly and also the open holes of the trammer side. I did this by lifting the eighty-five pound plugger from rung to rung and then stepping across from rung to rung myself. At one point, this partner looked and me and shouted out, "Don't fall." I wasn't worried at all because I thought I had my safety line on and waved my partner off with a carefree smile. Having finished drilling the rocks on the trammer side I then moved the plugger from rung to rung to retreat back off the grizzly. And when I got off the grizzly I reached behind myself to unsnap my safety line. It wasn't there and I then realized what I had done and immediately my legs began to tremble uncontrollably. My knees were literally knocking together. To this day mining is the only job I ever had where occasionally my legs would tremble in fear. Another one of my nine lives shot to hell.

Even if I had fallen it is not certain that the safety line would have saved me. The safety lines we had in those days and the safety lines used today are made to an entirely different standard. Rather than being capable of arresting a fall, the lanyards in use in those days would be considered today to be only suitable for travel restriction. That is to say that if you were, for example, working fifteen feet from the edge of a flat roof, you might wear a lanyard with a ten-foot reach, so you couldn't mistakenly go to the edge of the roof (and fall off). In addition the safety lines we used were often left in the blast area when blasting took place, so the lines were frequently badly frayed by having rocks blasted through them (believe it or not). I can remember using safety lines that were half cut through due to flying pieces of rock. We did have a chap who fell through once though, and his safety line did save him.

There were other accidents at the grizzly. Unexploded powder in the rocks we drilled was always a worry. One time we had a fellow who drilled into powder and blasted himself. By the way it was explained to me afterwards, he was blinded in one eye and couldn't see out of the other one after the accident. I was told that they found his eyeglasses in his back pocket after the accident, which is crazy in my opinion.

After this guy blasted himself some of the bosses came down underground and told me that I had to start washing all the rocks off before I drilled them and turn them over and wash them again looking for drill holes that might contain powder. I never did. Father told me if I did, it would take so long they would probably fire me. The guys above my head were covering their asses and exposing mine, which I have since come to understand happens quite frequently in the work world. I was pretty close to the bottom of the shitpile, so that was where the buck stopped.

One time I drilled on a rock and just as I got through drilling it some dirt fell in and darn, there was another hole right beside the hole I had just drilled. There was no powder in it mind you but I didn't want to start answering questions about why I had drilled a hole in this rock when there was already a hole there, so I got some wet muck and covered up one of the holes until I was ready to blow up the evidence.

A bootleg is a drillhole in the rock which has not completely exploded and may or may not contain unexploded dynamite. I don't know what the rules underground are nowadays but back in those days it was my understanding that if a person drilled within six inches of a bootleg it would be considered a criminal offense and not only could there be fines and possible jail time but the person could be blacklisted and never able to work in an Ontario mine again. Don't forget that anyone who drilled into a bootleg was endangering not only themselves but also any partner he might be working with. If I had drilled into that hole in the rock that was already there and if the hole had contained dynamite, the consequences may have been tragic, for me anyway. I didn't have a partner at the time.

People not wearing safety glasses in an industrial setting has always seemed like the height of lunacy to me. When a grizzlyman hit a rock with a sledgehammer there were always little bits of rock flying off and hitting him on the face or on the eyeglasses. My eyeglasses from that time had lots of pockmarks on them and I had two lenses broken while I was wearing them. The eye doctor I had bought the lenses from had given me a free replacement guarantee if the lenses were broken while I was wearing them. I think he was a bit skeptical the first time I showed up with a broken lens for replacement. The second time he replaced the lens without saying too much but I think he probably thought I was running some kind of scam to get new lenses out of him.

I mentioned above about how the scooptram had come in over my head and my partner had waved for him not to dump. I had a similar incident happen on the thousand-foot grizzly one time.

Now I don't exactly know how to put this next part. There were all nationalities working in the mines but they were mostly at that time in that mine French and Nova Scotians. By and large my experience with the French was very positive and maybe I will get into that later on. Now mind you my experience is that there is also a small number of Frenchmen that take offence at the least little thing and will fight at the drop of a hat. Now the Nova Scotians are generally all right too. Don't get me wrong on this but it has been my observation that there is a small subset of these people that through one kind of foolishness or another your life isn't worth a plugged nickel so to speak.

And so it was that I found myself working on the thousand-foot level of the East Mine with a chap who didn't seem so bad at the time but who has given me some reason to marvel that I am still here to write these words.

In those days father used to get me up to go into work and one day he forgot to set the alarm, so we got into work late. As I said, at that time I was working on the thousand-foot grizzly and this crazy Nova Scotian was driving the scooptram dumping muck on the grizzly. He started without me because I was late and by the time I arrived there was a big pile of muck on the grizzly. Like I said before most of this muck would just slide through if the grizzly were kept clear but if the grizzly wasn't kept clear it plugged up and the job basically became a nightmare. I asked this crazy sonofabitch Nova Scotian to stop dumping for a few minutes so that I could clear the grizzly but he refused. This led to a confrontation in which I refused to get off the grizzly and he came up over the grizzly with a twelve-ton bucket of muck over my head. I always remember that Big Al Szarski was standing off to the side of the grizzly and I think he was afraid to move a muscle lest it be interpreted as a signal by him that it was okay to dump. Eventually I backed down and got off the grizzly for the crazy sonofabitch. I had taken a big chance though and events afterwards would indicate how big.

There was one other incident with this chap that I shudder to think about now. In order to allow the scooptram to come in to dump there was a short drift there for the scooptram to back into and then come out to dump. On the upper levels of the mine it was a bit cool; so we often used to eat our lunch in this turnaround because it was a bit warmer in there since there was a pocket of air there that the ventilation air didn't seem to reach.

Now you understand that when the scooptram backed in, there wasn't much room between the bumper of the scooptram and the rock wall at the back of this turnaround. And since we were sitting at the back of this turnaround our heads were between the rock wall and the bumper of the scooptram, in, as I said, quite close quarters. As I recall there were three of us there that day and the crazy sonofabitch was driving the scooptram (not that I wasn't being a bit crazy myself that day just for being there sitting at the back of the turnaround). Anyway, that's the way it was when the Captain came by and saw what was going on and he started screaming at us to get out of there. Nobody got hurt but the potential for all three of us to be killed was so great that I shudder at the thought of it all these years later.

Of course all these years later I have more information to work with. One year at Christmas time there was only a skeleton crew on duty at the mine and the crazy guy was one of them. The mine we worked in at that time was right beside an open pit and when they took muck out of the mine they just took it and dumped it into the open pit. Anyway the crazy guy got to drinking with the truck driver who was doing the transporting and dumping. And when the truck driver backed up to dump into the pit there was just a ten by ten piece of timber there to let him know he had backed up far enough and that if he backed up any further he would be over into the pit. On this occasion he ripped out the ten by ten and the thirty-five ton Euclid with both men in it went over into the open pit. The truck driver was killed in the fall. The crazy sonofabitch was badly injured. I don't think he ever returned to work. I was around that mine for quite a while afterwards and he never came back there anyway.

There are some men who are going to kill in one way or another sooner or later. I realized afterwards that this man was one of them. I'm just lucky it wasn't me. Figure out who these guys are and stay away from them.

Father was one of the men on that skeleton crew. I remember phoning home that night to make sure everything was all right after I heard about the fatality on the news. Father was fine.
Chapter 11: Sudbury - The Motor and Transporting Dynamite

I was involved in another blasting incident once on the grizzly. At the time I had a partner from down east by the name of Hughie. I can't remember his last name now but it was likely MacDonald or some such thing. Hughie was the grizzly leader and I was the helper at the time.

Hughie and I were getting ready to blast on the eight hundred foot grizzly at the East Mine and it was pretty close to the end of our shift. I had lost the light on my helmet because my battery had gone dead. There was a light above the grizzly but we removed it when we blasted so we wouldn't break it. So I was working pretty much in the dark and because of that we decided that Hughie would guard the shaft and I would light the fuse and then guard the other direction where the four drifts converged.

Now there were a few other small problems. As I have already said we used to cut the tape fuses down to five or six inches so that after we lit them they would go off in fifteen to twenty seconds. On top of that between Hughie and myself we only had three matches and those matches were paper matches and they were damp. And as if that wasn't bad enough the end of the tape fuse where it had to be lit had also gotten damp somehow. If we hadn't cut the darn thing this wouldn't have happened, as a thin skein of copper would have protected the end of the fuse. Anyway Hughie took off for the shaft and there I was trying to light a damp five or six-inch tape fuse with three matches that were also damp and doing this pretty much in the dark. Well I got down to my third match trying to light that fuse and the fuse was smoldering a bit as I recall but there was no spurt of flame out the end that would signify that the thing was in fact lit. And then what happened is that I kind of panicked because I thought to myself, here I am trying to light this thing in the dark and what if in the dark while I was fooling around with these damp matches and damp tape fuse the flame had spurted out the end of the fuse and I had missed it and then I would be standing there in the middle of a blast area holding a fuse that was cut to go off in fifteen or twenty seconds and God knows how much time had already passed. So I threw down the fuse and went to my guard position.

For the first few seconds I was guarding I half expected to hear the blast go off but it didn't. So I waited and waited. At one point a couple of trammers came by and I talked to them for a while. The trammers left and went to the machine shop. They were gone for quite a while and when they came back I talked to them again for a while. Don't forget that it was getting close to the end of our shift as this was going on. Finally I got tired of waiting and so I edged in close to the grizzly and started calling to Hughie. But Hughie wouldn't come. And finally I said to myself, "To hell with it, Hughie is the grizzly leader. If he won't come then I am not going in there either". And so I walked back to my guard position. I had no sooner than done so when there was a large explosion and everything was covered in smoke. The blast on the grizzly had gone off.

I don't know how much time had elapsed from the time I had thrown down that fuse until it went off. They used to say in the mines and I think it is in the Mining Act that you are not supposed to go back into a blast area for thirty minutes if the blast doesn't go off when planned. All I can say now is that it was at least thirty minutes and probably longer. The fuse should have gone off in fifteen to twenty seconds. Another thing I can say is that if Hughie would have come when I called him, we probably both would have been in the blast area when it went off.

I guess what happened is that when the fuse started smoldering it was lit all right but it was lit on the wax on the outside of the fuse instead of the powder on the inside. The fire then took a long time to smolder up to the fuse itself and go off. We came close. Thank God I didn't go in there and thank God for Hughie. Another of my nine lives shot to hell.

I spent a bit of time on the motor and also some time slushing muck as well.

One time I remember I was on the sixteen hundred foot level at the East Mine. I was working with a scooptram driver who was mucking out a ramp. I had a motor (a locomotive) with eight ore-cars cars attached. The scooptram driver would dump into the ore-cars and then I would go out and dump the muck down the ore-pass. I had to stop the train just before the ore-pass, open the door over the orepass and then drive the train forward. A ramp to the side of the railroad tracks caught the ore-cars as they passed causing them to dump automatically into the orepass. A key part of this operation, as you might expect, was opening the door over the orepass before putting the cars over the ramp.

Now one morning when I was on the graveyard shift and almost at the end of the shift I came out with a full train of muck to the orepass and I don't think I fell asleep but I just kind of forgot what I was doing and by the time I remembered I had to stop before the orepass and open the door over the orepass it was just too darn late. Oh, I slammed the motor into reverse all right but up and over the ramp I went with a car full of muck and the orepass door closed. Well I surveyed the carnage afterwards and I could see that the car had dumped on top of the orepass door and that the railroad car was off the track. Well I managed to get the orepass door up all right and most of the muck that was on top of the door went down of its own accord. I scurried around and managed to get most of the rest of it down as well. The problem then was that I still had a bloody railroad car off the track and no way to get it back on the track myself.

Well there was nothing else to do except go and tell my partner on the scooptram that I had a car off the track. He cursed and he swore but he came and helped me put it back on the track. It was near the end of the shift when we finished, so there was nothing else to do but walk out to the station and go home. On the way out my partner asked me, "What happened? A piece of muck on the track?" I replied with a quick, "Yup." He cursed and swore again but that was it. We never talked about it again.

I was a pretty haywire miner all right but I have to say that just about every miner you ever talk to has a similar story. Usually they go through a ventilation door somewhere.

And talking about haywire, I may as well relate another story concerning my motorman days although I am more than a little bit sheepish about this one. Like I said I was a haywire miner. Anyway at that time when you drove the motor, the motorman had to fill out a piece of paper stating that he had checked the diesel fuel, the motor oil, the hydraulic fluid and on and on. So every day I would scribble a few lines on the papers; initial them and hand them in. Then one day the shift boss collared me and said, "You're not doing a good enough job filling out those papers". So later in the day I asked him to give me a lesson in how he wanted me to fill out the papers, which he duly did. And I duly filled out those papers as he had instructed me all the rest of the time I did that job. Now I know it sounds a little bit silly but I just didn't realize that he actually wanted me to check all those things and so I never did. It didn't dawn on me until years later that I was actually supposed to check the oil and all those other things. So far as I know the motor was still in good shape when I got off that job, so I guess I got away with it. I must have had a cross shift who had more brains than I did. As silly as I may have been, I must say I don't totally blame myself for this. The instructions were a bit scanty in my opinion. The shift boss should have taken me out there and put me through the motions of checking those things. Darn I was good at filling out those papers though.

When on the motor we frequently used to have to bring dynamite (and fuses) from the station (at the shaft) to the powder magazine. In the Mining Act there is something about putting dynamite at least two car lengths from the motor, since, of course, the motor worked on electricity and combustion and might provide a means of setting of the dynamite or blasting caps or both. I guess we didn't have much time for this two-car-length stuff because I don't ever remember doing it even once. We used to just pile the dynamite and blasting caps on top of the motor. It wouldn't be unusual to go down the drift with a half a ton or more of dynamite on top of the motor and we didn't care if we carried dynamite and blasting caps at the same time. If it had ever gone off, there would have been nothing left of me to find.

One time I remember we were using a cart rather than the motor to bring dynamite and blasting caps to the powder magazine. I always remember the blasting caps were at the front of the load and there was lots of powder in behind the blasting caps. And right at the powder magazine there was a ninety-degree bend in the tracks, and just as we got to the magazine a train loaded with muck came around the corner. This was a bit of a scary situation as it looked like the train was going to hit the cart loaded with dynamite with unforeseen consequences and, of course those blasting caps were there right up at the front. I ran into the powder magazine which had thick concrete walls and stood there with my thumbs in my ears. I was hoping that would save me from any blast. It wouldn't have. Just before I ducked into the powder magazine, I had a fast look at the other chap who had been pushing the cart with me. He was running down the drift away from the dynamite-laden cart just as fast as he could run. I doubt if he would have been saved either. Anyway, it was another one of my lucky days – the motorman managed to stop the motor before he hit the cart, although I remember he was just inches away when he stopped.

Later I drove the motor for a slushing crew and that is where I met I guy named John Johnson. In fact John was our level boss. And John had a couple of claims to fame.

One of these claims to fame was that he had been a highgrader and had spent a few years in prison for that. He described this venture thus: "It happened in Cobalt. They used to take highgrade silver out and stack it in potato sacks at the station; so one time on a long weekend another guy and I went in to the mine and I ran the hoist and he went underground and we brought up all this silver that was at the stations. We took the silver down to Toronto and made a pretty good buck on it. Anyway a little time went by and another long weekend came along, so my buddy and I decided to do it again. Well this time as we were driving away from the mine the highgrade squad came out of a swamp towards us. They had machine guns and everything. When I saw the machineguns I just got out of the truck and put my hands up and said, 'Yeah guys. You got me.'" If I remember correctly he got three years in Kingston.

John's other claim to fame was that he used to do a considerable amount of sleeping underground. And like I said he was the level boss, so when he slept the whole crew used to sleep with him. Except for me of course, which sort of made me the odd man out and I wasn't exactly too well liked by that crew. Mind you they may have had some passable reasons that I will get into later. Anyway my job was to take the muck out that these guys had slushed and since there was no muck to take out because they were in the lunchroom sleeping instead of slushing, I had nothing to do. I used to go out and stand in the drift by myself. I always remember how eerily quiet it was out there when it should have been noisy as hell because of noise from the slushers.

I suppose in some ways I was covering for them. As the motorman I had to fill out a paper every day saying how much muck I had dumped down the orepass. John Johnson and don't forget he was the level boss told me to put down lots. I asked him how much and he just said, "Lots". I think it was kind of presented to me that a little bit of paper going down the orepass was normal and I didn't know and he was the level boss, so I started reporting eighty, ninety and a hundred cars a day. We were darned lucky if we were putting down sixteen cars a day and that was on a twelve-hour shift. Of course John Johnson and the rest of the crew would sleep for four hours on the overtime. One time the Captain said to me, "Are you really putting down all that muck you are reporting?" "Well," I replied, "there might be a little bit of paper in there." He screamed back at me, "I want muck, not paper". Nothing changed. And I don't know why he screamed at me – I wasn't the level boss or any other kind of boss.

I heard afterwards that they started measuring the muck in the orepass to see if they could figure out how much each crew was putting down. That was no problem to John Johnson. He just opened up the chains to let muck down from the level above, so it looked like we were putting down lots and the crew upstairs were the slackers. I met a few people with a lot of gall in my working life and John Johnson was surely one of them. He was eventually fired for sleeping on the job but the man got away with it for years. Strange how some people seem to be able to get away with these things for years while if other people (like me) step out of line one inch a Shift Boss, a Captain, a Police Officer or some other similar entity seems to be there immediately.

Well I don't want to go on and on ranting about John Johnson. Maybe its time I got on to some malfeasances I committed while I was working with this guy and there were a few.

It was always foggy in the heading in which I worked on that level. I guess it was just a place in the mine where the cold air and the warm air met and that produced fog. It didn't matter, night or day, summer or winter, you just couldn't see much in there. And I was the motorman charged with taking the muck out to dump. It was a pretty soft job really and maybe I couldn't stand the inaction.

Anyway we had one slusherman whose name was Fadil. I think he was a Yugoslav of some description and someone told me once maybe a Moslem Yugoslav. I don't recall he was a really bad guy but maybe just a bit excitable and highstrung. Anyway one day I was sitting in the motor and I knew they just had to fill up this one last car and then I could go out and dump. And then through the swirling fog I heard someone say, "Well it's full" or words to that effect. So, bad judgment on my part but I figured I was okay to go and dump. Well it turned out that the car was full all right but Fadil had put his scraper through the hole, and his scraper was down on top of this full load of muck and worse than that he was down in the car himself trying to attach a cable to the scraper so he could pull it back up. Well given that he was in amongst these cables and whatnot, Fadil was none too happy when I started moving the car in which he was standing and he started screaming and shouting and carrying on something terrible.

Now we had a Captain at the time by the name of Red Maddox. His real name was Beverly, believe it or not, but I guess Bev and Red sounded close enough and besides he had red hair, so everybody called him, Red. He never did me any harm but as far as I was concerned he was a bit of a nasty sonofabich. And on top of being a sonofabitch he seemed to have some kind of a talent for knowing when I was doing something wrong and he always showed up on those occasions. He never showed up when John Johnson and the crew were sleeping for four hours on overtime but he always showed up when I was in hot water. Anyway there I was standing on the motor in the swirling fog with Fadil screaming and hollering when out of the swirling fog, Red Maddox appeared to start breathing down my neck. Anyway not much ever came of the situation. Fadil eventually calmed down but things were pretty tense between me and this crew and about to get tenser.

I just want to say here that maybe I wasn't the brightest light in the west moving that train the way I did but you know there was never a shred of training and there were no procedures in place for moving trains. We had a trackman who was supposed to assist the motorman when the cars were moved but there were no instructions on going to get him or anything. And the whole crew was a bit haywire including and especially the level boss. I do recall that at least I had the brains to start moving the train very slowly so that if there were as problem, there would be some warning.

Now there was one other incident that didn't exactly endear me to this crew. Remember that everything was foggy and I was pretty dependent on other people to tell me when it was all right to move the train. So one time this young French fellow told me to go forward and I did and it happened that someone else didn't know I had moved, so they slushed a bunch of muck down on the track. A bunch of screaming and hollering started up over this as well and of course out of the swirling fog Red Maddox walked in and of course he wanted to know what happened. Well I told him that someone else had told me to move forward. So he got his face right into mine and shouted at me, "Who was that other man?" Now as it happened the young French fellow was walking behind Red Maddox right at that particular moment and as he passed I nodded in his direction. Red Maddox turned and saw who it was, and as it happened the young French fellow wasn't wearing any safety glasses, so Red Maddox screamed at him, "Put your safety glasses on" and then left.

Now as you can imagine this didn't do too much to endear me to this young French fellow. And as I may have mentioned before the French are darned good miners and for the most part the nicest darn people you would ever want to meet but there are about maybe five percent of young Frenchmen that are a wee bit chippy and darn it I had just crossed one of the chippy ones.

Anyway as far as I was concerned the whole level was a nightmare. The shift boss came down one day and wanted to put me slushing on another level. I wasn't too unhappy about leaving and I will pick up that story later.

But first I should make some mention of just how inefficient this track mining was. With track mining we had quite a large crew. There were eight slushermen, a motorman, a trackman and a level boss on the level. So on the level there were twelve men and those twelve men were lucky to get thirty-two cars of muck out in a day and a twelve-hour day at that. When they brought the scooptrams underground there must have been a huge saving. It depended on the distance from the orepass of course but in general a scooptram with one driver would put a hundred cars of muck into the orepass in an eight-hour shift where, as I mentioned above, a slushing crew with twelve men would be lucky to put down thirty-two cars in a twelve-hour shift.
Chapter 12: Sudbury - Sleeping Underground and Blasting Heavy

On the next level I worked with a family that had come out of Northern Quebec somewhere. It seems to me that their family name was White or more likely Leblanc. I don't really remember. There were three brothers and I, and the father of the family was there too. The oldest brother was the Level Boss and he was the only one of the bunch that could speak English other than me. They were really fine people however and we seemed to get along fine despite the language problem.

I remember the father in particular. I had some French from school and somehow he got the idea that I could speak French and he used to speak to me in French all the time and at great length. Of course school French, as it is spoken, is pretty much different from French-Canadian French as it is spoken. It is something like the difference between English as it is spoken in Canada and English as it is spoken with a pretty hard Scottish accent. That's all my opinion of course and I suppose other linguists might have other opinions. Anyway I had quite long conversations with the father in which of course he did most of the talking. I understood maybe every tenth word but judging from the expressions on his face and his hand gestures and what not, I pretty much knew where to agree with him or nod my head or whatever. I suppose I might have learned the language a bit better if this went on long enough.

Anyway the bottom line is that these people were really fine people and despite some language problems we got along fine. There were no paper cars of muck put down with this crew. The Level Boss only reported exactly what we did. And there was no sleeping on the job on this level as there was with the other crew. Altogether I was much happier with this bunch than I was on the other level. I remember that after I worked with these French people for a month or so the Shift Boss came up to me one day and said I could go back to the other crew. I replied immediately that I was going to stay right where I was. He gave me a kind of peculiar look but allowed me to stay.

Just as an aside here I might add that there was nothing really unusual about working with the French in the mines. For a long time I also drove into work with one of my shift bosses who was French. He was also a great guy. I was not the only one in the car and of course the others were all French. I heard lots of conversations in French on the way into work and also on the way home and again only understood about every tenth word – but these were nice people.

Every second week or so a different one would drive, so we would switch cars and I suppose I am digressing here but one of these French chaps managed to buy a car in which someone had committed suicide. As if that weren't bad enough I guess they hadn't found the guy for some time after he passed away and so to put it bluntly he had decomposed in the car. That damned car was pretty high. I remember he had baking soda sprinkled all over the place but the car still stank to hell. I will never forget that smell. I sure hope he got a good deal on the car.

Anyway getting back to basics there are a couple of small stories about my time with this French crew. One of them involves a Shift Boss whose name I can't remember now but he had a reputation around the mine as being a bit of a piece of work and he surely was. Anyway at one time when we went down at the start of the shift we all went to the headframe at one time and the cage slowly but surely got us all down underground but then somebody decided that we should stagger our start times so that we weren't all hanging around in the headframe trying to go down at the same time. This of course meant that our times to go back up were similarly staggered. On this particular level we started going down at twenty minutes after the hour and this meant we came back up also at twenty minutes after the hour. It meant that I had to go up to surface at 06:20 hours whereas under the old system I would have gone up at 07:00 hours.

It just happened that this particular night the Level Boss who was the only other person on the level who could speak English was off work. On finishing our work we usually went to the lunchroom to pick up our lunchpails and then we had to walk out to the shaft. Generally we started this process a half hour before the end of the shift or in other words about 05:50 hours if we were going up at 06:20 hours. But this particular night we were a bit late and never got to the lunchroom until 06:00 hours. We still had plenty of time to make it out to the shaft for our ride up at 06:20 but we were just a bit late.

Anyway just after we got to the lunchroom at 06:00 hours this piece of work looks in the lunchroom and shouts out something like, "What the hell is going on here?" and then he slammed the door of the lunchroom shut and took off. In retrospect he did not realize that we were scheduled to go up at 06:20 hours and thought we were in the lunchroom way too early. Anyway not thinking too much of this outburst and figuring the guy would come to his senses, we proceeded to the shaft for our ride up to surface at 06:20 hours and found the shaft deserted. We rang and rang on the buzzer and the telephone and there was no answer.

Finally at 7:00 o'clock the cagetenders came and picked us up. By that time I was madder than a wet hen. Anyway I asked the cagetenders what was happening on the way up. They told me that the piece of work had given them instructions not to pick us up for one hour, so they had gone to lunch and left us underground. By the time I hit the office I was still madder than hell and I poked my head inside the doorway of the office and told the piece of work in no uncertain terms that he owed me an extra hours pay. I guess by that time he must have realized his mistake and of course there was no mistaking the look of outrage on my face because he immediately turned to the Captain and said that he owed me an extra hours pay. I said, "Not just me, everybody on the level." The Captain said something like, "What the hell's going on?" but after he looked at my face he didn't push it. I got the extra hours pay. I never did check with the others to see if they did. The next day the Level Boss was back into work and he asked me what had happened. Like I said I was the only one who could speak English except him. He seemed okay with my response and the outcome.

This was a non-union company and so I had been a bit nervy by demanding an extra hours pay although I suppose I was known for being a bit bad tempered at times. I remember one chap there who had a really easy job and one time the Shift Boss came and asked him to do something else for a few minutes. I don't know where this guy thought he was but he replied that he wasn't going to do it because, "It's not my job." His mining career only lasted a few seconds after that.

That kind of puts me in mind of another story and I know I'm kind of all over the place here. Anyway one time they hired a couple of new miners. Now what you have to understand here is that to the general public, if you work in a mine you are a miner, but if you work underground the miners are the ones who do the drilling and everybody else is a "dogfucker". Of course it follows that the drillers consider themselves to be the elite. And I don't know what it is like now underground after they brought in jumbos but back at that time the driftmen were considered the elite of the elite. On the bonus system the elite made more money too.

Anyway like I said they hired on these two miners and one day shortly after they started they didn't have a "mining" (i.e. drilling) job for them, so they sent them underground to find some shovels and fill in some ruts in the drift. Well when they got off the cage I could hear them talking about this and since they had not been given an elite job where they could earn bonus they felt this meant they should find the nearest lunchroom and go to sleep. Finding a shovel, doing a bit of work and then leaning up against the wall of the drift and dogging it wasn't good enough for these fellows. Anyway these guys took off in the direction of the lunchroom to go to sleep and it was hardly ten minutes later when the Captain was underground looking for them because he said he had a drilling job for them. Well the Captain looked around for a while, and then said he couldn't find them and he was looking pretty puzzled. Now maybe I should have sneaked down to the lunchroom to tell these guys what was going on and I like to think that's what I would do now but the lunchroom was off in a direction where I had no business going. And, of course, I admit that I was a bit chicken that I might get caught tipping them off. Anyway I said to the Captain that I thought I saw these two going in the direction of the lunchroom. He came back after a few minutes and said, "No I don't see them down there either." So I piped up and said that I thought they might be a bit closer to the lunchroom than he had already searched. There was a mechanic nearby when I said this and he kind of gave me a quizzical look after the Captain left but I just said, "The longer it takes him to find them, the madder he is going to get." Anyway this time the Captain found them and as they passed me on the way to the shaft the Captain was acting as if he was pretty mad, doing a lot of hollering and shouting and such.

These guys never got fired for this incident but I think maybe their names were shit afterwards. One time my father told me about a guy who was quitting the mine and I kind of think it was one of these guys. Early one week he walked up to the Shift Boss's office and told him he was going to quit at the end of the week. The Shift Boss replied, "You're quitting right now. Get your gear and get out".

I got caught by the Captain sleeping underground once myself. I was working with another chap and he was usually a pretty good worker, and I don't know what happened to him this one night but when lunch was over he just stayed there with the lights out and I guess he was sleeping; so I just stayed too although I wasn't really asleep. Anyway the Captain came in and hustled us out into the drift and as usual there was a lot of shouting and screaming. After a while he calmed down. I had the advantage of a bit of seniority at that mine by that time, so nothing much came of it. It was the only time I can remember sleeping underground and I got caught right away. How John Johnson got away with it for years, I'll never know.

To be honest I did a little sleeping one other time at the mine although it was on surface. We were going to do shaft inspection on a Sunday and when we did that job we had to wait for the electricians to finish inspecting the hoist first. It was in the winter and there was a big fan in the headframe blowing warm air and I got onto a bench underneath the fan as I was waiting and that warm air blowing over me put me right to sleep. Anyway as it happened the electricians ran into some kind of trouble and we never did do shaft inspection that day, so there was nothing to do. My partners including the shift boss said they tried to wake me up but I guess I was thoroughly asleep; so the just left me there in the headframe all by myself sound asleep and they went back to the office building. I slept for four hours and just woke up on time to have shower and go home. The shift boss told me afterwards that if any brass had come around he would have sent someone over to the headframe to wake me up.

I always laughed about a couple of guys who got caught sleeping underground one time. They were sound asleep with their boots off. The Captain came in and saw them like that and before he woke them up he hid their boots. Then he woke them up with the usual amount of screaming and hollering and these poor guys were looking around all over the place for their boots because all they wanted to do at that point was get away from him. I suppose it was one those situations where you might laugh about it many years later.

There is one other incident that stands out in my mind with this French crew I was working with at that time and that was a blasting incident. I was slushing at the time and some rocks got hung up at my first boxhole down the trench. There was however a nice hole drilled right through the rock that seemed to be the main culprit in holding things up and it really wouldn't take much powder to blow up that rock and start things moving again. So I got a half a stick of dynamite and a tape fuse and put it in that rock and it was such a small blast I didn't bother telling anybody about it. And just before the blast was to go off I was guarding just to one side of the entrance to the trench when, wouldn't you know it, one of the French fellows came sauntering up to the other side of the hole. Well I motioned at him to stay where he was but he just looked at me like I was crazy and kept on coming. Just before the shot went off I reached out and dragged him to safety at the other side of the hole. That was probably a bit overdramatic, as he probably wouldn't have gotten hurt anyway. After all the dynamite was about twenty feet away from him and it was only half a stick. The Level Boss asked me the next day how much dynamite I had used and he seemed satisfied when I told him that it was just half a stick.

That is not to say I didn't blast a bit heavy from time to time. I had some rocks stuck up in one box-hole that were very large and I always considered it my duty to try and blast these rocks down although there wasn't much chance of doing so. And, of course, the more I tried to blast these rocks down without success, the more dynamite I used. So one time I remember I put two hundred pounds of dynamite up in the hole. I used to work a lot of overtime in those days but it just happened that night that I went home early just after we set off the blast. Anyway part of the slusher trench that was over the railroad tracks was made out of reinforced concrete and part of it was made out of five-inch timbers. Well it seems that the concussion from my two hundred pounds of dynamite blew apart the part of the slusher trench that was made of five-inch timbers. The rest of the crew told me that they spent their overtime that night putting the slusher trench back together. After that they put a limit on me of fifty pounds of dynamite. I never did get the rocks in that hole blasted down.

When a person works with explosives often enough, he can get a bit blasé about explosives. It was pretty much an every day occurrence to go underground and see some miner smoking a cigarette while he was sitting on a couple of tons of explosives and very likely with the blasting caps nearby.

The old miners used to tell me that if you held a flame to dynamite it wouldn't go off. Being the inquisitive chap that I was I naturally had to test this theory; so I went into a powder magazine and cut a small chunk off the end of a roll of b-line. They probably don't use b-line in the mines anymore but it was a plastic cord with a high explosive inside. Anyway I held a match up to this chunk of b-line and, yes, the old miners were right. Nothing happened, and I still have all of my fingers to prove it. I don't recommend that anyone else try this experiment.

I remember seeing father one time being what I would say was a bit blasé around dynamite. He had drilled off a round that I think was for a powder magazine. Regardless, the rounds were all hooked up with igniter cord. The miners used amex (an explosive) and dynamite to load their holes, and if there was any amex left over they just threw it on the ground in front of the blast area. When I looked at father he was standing in front of the blast area holding out the igniter cord making sure that all the shots were igniting properly. As he did so the sparks from the igniter cord were falling on the explosive below. I pretty much think father knew what he was doing but I don't recommend this practice either to anyone else.

Eventually Inco took over the mine I was working in. They took over the shaft first and there was a lot of carping between the Inco guys and the contractors. This lasted until one day the Inco cagetenders left us all underground for exactly one hour after the end of our shift. That pretty much ended the carping. We were a pretty mollified bunch when we finally came up from underground that day.

I worked with another crew briefly before I got transferred to another mine. I wasn't with them long and I don't remember much about them. The main thing I remember is that within a week of transferring to the other mine the chap who replaced me on my old job was killed. He was on the motor and wanted to dump some ore down the orepass. What they said must have happened was that the door over the orepass got stuck and that he had tried to open it with a scaling bar. They figured that the door had opened suddenly and that he had lost his balance and fallen into the orepass. I never noticed that the door was prone to getting stuck but who knows, maybe a piece of muck had gotten wedged in there somehow and caused the door to stick.

Also about this time some guy in the office got the bright idea that they could utilize their manpower better if we switched shifts every two days. That is to say that we would work two days of day shift then two days of graveyard shift and then two days of afternoon shift. Anyway this lasted about one week and I came up from underground one day and there was a big crowd of miners (not dogfuckers) who were surrounding the Shift Boss's office and screaming that they weren't going to do it any more. I always remember the Shift Boss in there with his hands up in the air saying, "Now, now guys. We'll straighten this out". That was the end of that crazy shift.

I got passingly familiar with health and safety as the years went by and realized that the mine management had broken some rules in a branch of health and safety called ergonomics by imposing these weird shift changes. First, a person should not have to change shifts that often. Second, the shifts should change from days to afternoons to nights so that a person just has to stay up a little later after each shift change. Shifts should not change from days to graveyards to afternoons as the worker just cannot get used to these hours fast enough. It's amazing that even in the twenty-first century many workplaces just don't seem to get this, and it is generally a good indication of poor management when the shifts switch in this back-asswards way. I would recommend to any worker caught in this situation that he or she start looking for another job as soon as possible or better yet don't even start in one of these anti-deluvian workplaces. By the way, the Occupational Health and Safety Act in Ontario was largely brought in because of atrocious conditions in the mines, and particularly after a strike for safety reasons in Elliot Lake in the early seventies. I started in the mines in 1966 and last worked underground in 1972. The Occupational Health and Safety Act became law in 1979. I hope there have been some improvements since my days in the mines.

Anyway I was off to another mine. Just as a footnote to this, I might mention that at one time some guys had managed to organize a union at the mine I then worked in. It never did amount to much. The union organizers didn't get transferred from one mine to the other as I did. They were just laid off.
Chapter 13: Sudbury - The Cage and a Friend's Death

By the time I arrived at the new mine (the West Mine) the grizzly had to some extent been mechanized as they had a new piece of equipment called a ho-ram installed on the grizzly. I have to say that this piece of equipment worked pretty well and I had a pretty soft job for a while.

It may have been a soft job but it was a seven day per week job. All the jobs at the mine were at least six days a week but on the mucking crew it was seven days per week. Anyway this one time I remember I worked six weeks without a day off and during that time I worked three double shifts to replace others who had taken a day off. I kind of decided that I deserved a day off; so I asked the shift boss for a Sunday off work. He said, "No." and I wasn't real happy about it but I came into work. Anyway the following Saturday I was at work and the orepass was jammed full of muck; so I decided I could pretty safely take Sunday off and this time I wasn't silly enough to ask for it. I don't know exactly what happened but I think someone else had the same idea as me and had taken Saturday night off. Anyway when I came into work on Monday morning the orepass didn't have a stick of muck in it.

I can only describe the shift boss as being hopping mad. He followed me right down underground screaming and hollering at me all the way. Finally in exasperation, I said, "Come on. I haven't had a day off in seven weeks." To this he replied, "When you got hired on in that office, did they tell you that you were going to get a day off." "Well no." I replied. At this he triumphantly said, "Yeah!" Likely the guy who had missed Saturday night was one of the shift boss's down home buddies from Nova Scotia and they likely never said a word to him.

I should have stuck with the soft job but I ended up becoming a cagetender/skiptender. As I shall describe this job had a few interesting highpoints.

One time I was skipping muck in the loading pocket down about 2300 feet. I think the Shift Boss who was new on the job forgot to put a bintender up on top. The muck was good that day and we filled the bin up fast in the morning. Eventually because the bin was full, the skip got caught on the lip of the bin while trying to dump its load of muck. The hoistman played out cable with the skip stuck at the bin and eventually the skip cut loose, snapped the cable and then fell over two thousand feet in freefall. I was sitting in the loading pocket about ten feet away from it when it went by and all I remember seeing was a bunch of sparks and there was a kind of roar as it went by. Afterwards all kinds of rocks and debris started falling down the shaft. My partner and I hid under the chutes in the loading pocket but the telephone was ringing repeatedly. Finally my partner made it out to answer the telephone. It was the Underground Superintendent and the first thing he said was, "Are you both still alive?"

That puts me in mind of a story my brother told me one time. He was working in a mine where they had a state of the art system for watching the bins and when the bin was deemed full by this state of the art system then the hoist shut down automatically so that overloading the bin was impossible. But one time my brother was down in the loading pocket with an old miner when the hoist shut down automatically because the bin was full. The old miner then pulled a rusty nail out of his pocket and shoved it into a hole in a small electrical box that was in the loading pocket. "There," he said to my brother, "did you know that when the shaft goes down because the bin is full, you can get three more skips in the bin if you push a nail into that hole." After telling me this story my brother commented that you could always trust a miner to find a way to screw things up.

Which puts me in mind of another story. I was down in the States one time at a safety conference and the group I was in was addressed by the CEO of a fairly major American company which supplies equipment to the mining industry in the United States and Canada and beyond. Anyway the CEO started to tell us a story and as a preamble to the story he started going on and on about how stupid miners were. I don't know exactly why but I suddenly blurted out that I had at one time worked in the mines.

Well the reaction was sort of like I had dropped a bombshell in the room. The CEO abruptly stopped speaking and fixed me in a rather icy glare and an older man at the back of the room who I think was probably senior even to the CEO suddenly stood up and started speaking directly to me, seemingly trying to change the topic du jour from stupid miners to just about anything else. I never did get to hear the end of the story about stupid miners. I pretty much agreed though with what the CEO was saying and likely could have told him a few stories myself. After all quite a few miners are passingly haywire. It was one time I wish that I had kept my big mouth shut.

When I worked on the cage, we did shaft inspection every third Sunday. It was a pretty good go for a while because the electricians took the shaft in the morning to do their inspection and the cagetenders did their inspection afterwards generally starting around eleven o'clock or four hours into the shift. Well after a while someone decided that there wasn't much sense in the cagetenders coming in at seven o'clock when all they did was stand around for four hours waiting for the hoist, so after that we came in for eleven o'clock and got paid for eight hours. Now this was pretty nice because the night before this we were on afternoon shift and worked until eleven o'clock; so then we could get off work, have a couple of beers on Saturday night (Sudbury Saturday night) and have time to get some sleep before we went back in for eleven o'clock. And don't forget that this was a seven day a week job, so this little break every third week was kind of nice.

It lasted until father became the shift boss and he told me I had to be in at seven o'clock the following morning. There wouldn't be any of this going in at eleven o'clock and getting paid for eight hours with him around. Anyway I told father I would be in at the usual time, which was eleven o'clock as far as I was concerned, and the next day I showed up at eleven o'clock. Father promptly sent me home because he had already called in another cagetender. The next morning I went and complained to the Captain and told him I wanted four hours pay. The Captain did a lot of spluttering but he finally paid me the four hours although he also told me that from now on I had to be in at seven o'clock. I guess the Captain was in a bit of ticklish situation seeing as to how it was a father-son sort of thing.

Father never mentioned it again. In later years I felt kind of bad about it. Father was a guy who worked hard all his life. He had worked about twenty-five years in the mines by that time. And before that he had been a Second World War soldier. When he landed with a commando unit in France sixteen of the twenty men in his platoon were killed and there I was telling him what to do. The young are always impetuous. This was father's big chance at management after working hard in his life and I was raining on his parade. I still feel bad about it but there is not much I can do about it now.

When we were doing shaft inspection on the cage side, it wasn't too bad as we could stand on top of the cage and the skip was above us. On the skip side we had nothing above us and we had to stand on a rather small tray above the skip. Generally the shift boss was in the middle and the two cagetenders were on either side. We would bang the guys with an axe on the way down to see if they were loose and we would stop to fix any that were loose. One time the hoistman started dropping us too fast as we were standing on the tray above the skip. At this I instinctively backed into the centre of this tray over the skip and when I did so all I could feel was two asses pressing into my ass and nobody was moving.

You understand that when we were in the shaft doing inspection the Shift Boss was in the middle and facing the rock wall to the back of the shaft. One cagetender was facing the rock wall to one side of the shaft but the other cagetender was facing an open hole since it was a two compartment shaft and either the cage or skip compartment was on the other side. I don't know if it was my imagination or not but it always seemed to me that my partner used to run and get on the side facing the rock wall leaving me to get on the other side facing a hole that was about 2500 feet deep from the top of the shaft. And back in those days we didn't use safety lanyards for this job, which seems a bit silly to me now but it was just the way things were done in those days. What you have to remember is that everything is dark underground and you can't see that you are standing over a height, so it doesn't bother you much. It would have scared the crap out of me if could have seen the bottom twenty-five hundred feet below. Of course when I was at the top of the headframe where we started the shaft inspection it was possible to see from there to surface which was about fifty feet. My legs used to shake together a wee bit at the top of the headframe because I could see this and I didn't like the height but once I got to surface level and everything was dark down below it didn't bother me even though it was still more than twenty-four hundred feet to the bottom. If I could have seen what I was doing I wouldn't have been anywhere near the place without a safety lanyard on and maybe I wouldn't have been near the place with one on either.

I always used to get a weird feeling when we did shaft inspection below the loading pocket doors. One time, many years after I had worked in the mines I met a woman who was a widow. Her husband, his partner, the Shift Boss and another man were doing shaft inspection when accidentally a loading pocket door opened above them. All four were killed. The widow told me that ninety tons of muck came down on top of them. Someone else told me that they rewrote the Mining Act afterwards for lockout. For myself, I still remember how years ago I would look up at those loading pocket doors as we went by them wondering. It still feels weird and a bit creepy to know that you did something many times and got away with it that four others did not get away with and lost their lives.

Before I relate the next story perhaps I should mention to the novice that there was a buzzer system in the shaft and it was by use of these buzzers that the cagetender signaled the hoistman what he wanted to do. Some of these buzzers were kind of stiff and a bit hard to use to send a proper signal. On top of that we had another cagetender working with us on steady dayshift and this chap was a real expert cagetender and this guy could ring the bells just as fast and sharp as anyone could wish no matter how sticky they might seem to someone else. So we had a situation where like I said some of these pull cords on the buzzers were a bit sticky and we had a real expert at ringing them, and of course this gave rise to a situation where we were trying to emulate this expert by ringing the bells real fast like him and this didn't always work out. In retrospect I guess it was a situation where a little bit of training might have come in handy. I mean somebody should have told us to forget about speed-ringing the bells, the important thing was to make sure the hoistman understood what you wanted and if the buzzers were a bit stiff and hard to use just take more time.

Now sometimes when taking something heavy off the cage it is necessary to do what we called putting the cage on chairs. This was simply a couple of hooks on either side of the shaft that one could use to hang the cage up in the shaft so that the hoistman could lower some extra cable and let the stretch out of the cable. If one did not take the stretch out of the cable the cage would immediately go up maybe ten or fifteen feet when the heavy object was taken off and this could cause a serious accident.

There was a rather spectacular accident one time at the East Mine a few years before I started underground. A couple of chaps were taking a motor down to the four thousand foot level and for whatever reason they didn't put the cage on chairs. When the front wheels of the motor hit the level the cage immediately went up and my understanding is that the door of the cage (which rolled up and down) and the back of the motor came together and cut the man's head in half. There was no one else on the level at the time and so the chap that was with this guy had to remove the fellow's half-head from the track, put the cage on chairs as it should have been in the first place, finish taking the motor off the cage and then go up to surface and report the accident. It was said that this guy went a bit crazy afterwards and they gave him a job cleaning up the shitpails (honeypails) around the mine. One time when I was there he was the talk of the mine because he got all the top brass in the mine on the cage with him and then took off the lid of a honeypail and stuck his finger in and started stirring it up. So I suppose he did go a bit crazy all right but he came from down east, so he may have been crazy before too.

Anyway what you have to know here is that when the cagetender wants the cage to come to a full stop and stay there, he rings three bells or dot, dot, dot. But the raise-lower signal to put the cage on chairs was rather similar as it was one, one-two or dot, pause dot, dot.

Anyway with this in mind one time I came to the station at the seventeen-fifty level at the West Mine and there was a very short little French fellow with a jackleg on his back standing at the station wanting a ride to surface. As I pulled into the station I grabbed the bellcord and rang what I thought was dot, dot, dot, to come to a full stop and then I immediately opened the door at the shaft for this miner to get on the cage. He jumped on the cage and just as he did the cage lurched up. The hoistman and I don't blame him for this thought that I had rung dot, pause dot, dot, to put the cage on chairs. The French chap kind of said, "What the Hell?" and I immediately grabbed the bellcord and rang for surface. This French fellow was a kind of quiet guy, so I never heard another word about this. But I have to say that I sometimes think I have a bit of posttraumatic stress syndrome from the mines and I have woken up many times in the middle of the night thinking about this incident. I am very thankful that this guy didn't jump out into thin air when he got on the cage.

Another time we loaded a pipe into the skip on top of the cage and were to take it to the seventeen-fifty level. A guy was using a tugger hoist nearby, so I couldn't hear the bell signals and I rang some sloppy signals and ended up with the pipe on the twenty-two-fifty level. Now you understand that it is one thing to go down with a pipe in the skip and quite another thing to go up because if you hit something in the shaft on the way down you would probably get away with it but on the way up it would surely be a disaster because you would probably snap the hoisting cable. Anyway we left the pipe on the twenty-two-fifty level and they took it up later after making sure it was very securely wired into the skip on top of the cage.

Kinking a cable in the shaft was very bad news because the cable would work at the kink and eventually break. I gave a bad signal one time and kinked a cable. I got away with it because I owned up to it right away and the next morning they were working on the cable anyway, so they just cut the kink out as it was near the end of the cable. Somebody told me there wasn't much cable left on the drum afterwards when the cage was at the bottom of the shaft. Anyway judging by some of the partners I got, they probably couldn't find anybody much better than me even as much of a disaster as I was. A person had to have their wits about them all the time on the cage although I have to keep saying this, a little bit of training would have been nice.

We were also quite lax in our rules regarding the number of men who could get on the cage. In a regular mining company they would count the number of men getting on the cage and the number was generally so that the cage was full but not overflowing which could be unsafe. Particularly on the way up at the end of the end of the shift the men used to pack themselves in like sardines. If a man had his arms below his waist when he was packed in he frequently could not raise his arms above his waist for the duration of the trip. Of course they were always those who kept one arm up in the air so they could smoke a cigarette. When they finished the cigarette they invariably dropped it into the shirt pocket of the nearest miner who of course was unable to free his arms to get the cigarette out of his pocket and so the cigarette would smolder in his pocket and burn a hole in his shirt until he reached surface. This was usually accompanied by a bunch of good-natured guffawing by the other miners in the cage.

One time I was taking a load of men underground in the morning and I had an event that I have wondered about to this day. The cage was full to overflowing all right but even when full to overflowing there was always room for one more as all the men would shove back to make room. As the cagetender I was the last one on the cage and not expecting any trouble getting on the cage, I rang the bells to descend before I was fully on the cage although thank God I at least did have one foot on the cage. On this particular day there was considerable resistance to me getting fully on the cage. I could tell that there was somebody directly behind me who was standing with his chest out in a very firm manner to prevent me from getting on the cage. Normally the person behind you would also be pushing back to help you get fully on the cage. I went down the first thirty of forty feet sort of half in and half out of the cage struggling with this person behind me who I could not see. Finally I gave a very determined shove backwards and the resistance gave way. Now at that point I was in the cage with the person who had tried to keep me out of the cage directly behind me and you can bet I wanted to know who that was and I did see who it was when he got off at the first level.

Now I would have to say that this was a case of attempted murder but what does one do. I probably would have been in trouble for not being fully on the cage when it went down although I would think attempted murder would have been worse. The guy who did this was a driller not a dogfucker and as a driller he likely would have had the sympathy of the higher ups. I probably would have lost my job before he did. There were lots of witnesses including people who came to me and told me they saw what happened but proving it still may have been difficult. After all how do you prove that a man is standing erect and pushing his chest out? He likely would have just said that there was no more room on the cage and there was nothing he could do about it or maybe he would have said that he was just joking around and having a little fun with me. Or maybe he might have said that he was trying to teach me a lesson that might save my life in the future. For sure he would have pointed out that I should have made sure I was fully on the cage before I rang the bells to go down and he would have been right about that.

I have mulled over in my mind many times why this chap would do such a thing. It's hard to say. There are lots of assholes around and no doubt he was one of them. He was one of the elite in the mine – a driftman; so he likely expected he could get away with things and of course as a cagetender, I was just a dogfucker. In those days I was young and rowdy and liked to go out for a drink and news of my drinking had likely reached back to the mine making this guy some kind of vigilante getting rid of an undesirable element in society, in his mind anyway.

Anyway, God only knows what this fellow's motivation was. I don't doubt for one minute that there have been murders underground where it was impossible to prove that a crime had been committed.

I remember one time I was having a beer in the Queen's Hotel in Kirkland Lake and I got talking to this guy and he told me he was a hoistman from Timmins and he told me he was the world's worst hoistman. I told him that we made a good pair because I was the world's worst cagetender and I wasn't kidding. I don't think it was my forte. Mind you, I was young and like I've said before, a little training would have been nice.

As I mentioned above this one chap had the job of going around the mine collecting the honey pails. Later on they did bring in some shit cars underground. You would sit up on top of these shit cars and there would be water bubbling beneath you and you would crap into the bubbling water. I think the idea was that the bubbling water would break down the shit and then the shitty water went into the ditch and eventually down the shaft and then they pumped it up to surface. I guess the shit was so diluted by that time that nobody noticed it. The moral of the story is this: don't drink the water underground unless you are sure of where it comes from.

There were no walls or anything around you when you were sitting up on top of the shit car. And near one of these shit cars there was a raise that came down from the level above. One time these two guys came down the raise and they could see the light of someone on the shit car, so they turned their lights off so they couldn't be seen, so they could see who was on the shit car. Well it turned out to be the head guy in the mine. So these two fellows in a very surreptitious manner and with their lights turned off, rigged up a water hose so that when it was turned on, it would spray the head guy in the mine as he was sitting on the shit car. They then turned the water on and high-tailed it up the raise so they wouldn't be caught.

Father and I used to shower in different dries (shower rooms) but I always remember the night father told me that John Foster, the head guy at the mine, had come into the showers and sprayed everybody down with cold water. Later when I heard the story about John being sprayed with water on the shit car, I was able to put two and two together and figure out why he had sprayed all the men down with cold water. I'm not sure if father ever figured it out.

Going number two was always a bit of a problem around the mine for me anyway. On surface they had regular toilets where one could go to the bathroom but in the one dry the toilets had no doors and in the other dry there were no walls around the toilet never mind a door. It wasn't uncommon at all to walk in there and see some miner sitting there right out in the open having a crap. I didn't care so much if other people did this but for me to do it, well that was a bit much for my sensibilities.

Anyway one night I had to go quite badly at the end of the shift and when I finished my shower, there was practically no one else left around the mine site, so I decided on chancing a shit in one of these stalls with no door. Of course as soon as I sat down the Shift Boss walked by and on spotting me sitting on the crapper, he poked his head in and asked if I had seen so and so, who I presume he was looking for. Anyway I kind of jumped half off the toilet at this intrusion and turned a bit red in the face and no I hadn't seen so and so. The Shift Boss thought this was funny as hell about how embarrassed I was and he was forever asking me afterwards if I were "giving 'er shit". There's no accounting for some people's sense of humour.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to mention another excretory problem in the mining industry or at least the mining industry as I saw it. The shower room in a mine is called a dry and there would probably be multiple showerheads overhead in the dry and many miners would usually be in there having a shower at the end of the shift. Since there were so many, they were usually packed in quite closely and I can often remember that many of these miners seemed to think that the shower was an appropriate place to urinate. Many a time I can remember standing there having a shower with the urine of the miner beside me running between my toes on the way to the drain. I suppose there was no harm done. It wouldn't stick to you and there was enough water running around there to clean things up afterwards. It was however, at least in my humble opinion, an esthetic problem.

Getting away from excretory problems to something a bit more dangerous, one time I worked overtime taking a scooptram underground. Now this was an ST12 scooptram and very much too large to be taken down in one piece; so they took it apart and took it down in three pieces which were the bucket, the front section and the motor section. Now in order to facilitate this they made a rack with wheels on it to go down the shaft and the section of the scooptram that was being transported was slung underneath this rack by what I recollect were two three-eighths inch cables. Now in order for the section of scooptram being transported to be taken out of the shaft once it got down to the level both of these three-eighths inch cables had to be attached. And wouldn't you know it, when the motor section of the scooptram, the heaviest section, got down to the level there was only one three-eighths inch cable attached. Well like I said, the other cable had to be attached before it could come out of the shaft and sending it back up to surface wasn't an option, so they put a plank across the shaft and someone had to walk out on the plank with the ST12 motor section hanging above their head by just one three-eighths inch cable and reach up and attach the other cable which was just hanging there loose. And that was when the Shift Boss turned to me and said, "Hall, you're a single man, get out there." Falling off the plank wasn't so much of a problem because there was a bulkhead made out of five inch timbers about fifteen or twenty feet below me, so I wouldn't have fallen that far. But if that one three-eighths inch cable holding up the heaviest section of the scooptram had ever broken or if the hoistman had made a mistake I would have been toast. To attach the cable I had to turn the bolt on a u-clamp. The Shift Boss was watching me and when I had made just a couple of turns he was screaming at me to get out of there. There probably aren't too many people around who have been given extremely dangerous jobs in industry because they were single men. Father was working there that day. He never said anything.

One time I always remember was when one of the scooptrams was leaking oil from the hydraulic hoses. The mechanic was in there beside the tires having a look and being the bright-eyed bushy-tailed guy that I was, I decided I should be in there having a look as well. So there I was looking at leaking hydraulic hoses on a scooptram and standing right beside a tire that was just as tall as I was, while I was looking. But then some little warning bells went off in my head and I said to myself that I didn't think that was just the best place to be standing, right beside a tire that was a tall as I was and so I got the heck out of there. Just after I got out the scooptram driver stood up in his seat and his lampcord got caught in the gearshift lever as he stood up. At this the scooptram lurched backwards about ten feet and slammed into the side of the drift. I guess I would have been under that tire if I hadn't gotten out of there. You just never know. How many of my nine lives am I up to now?

A friend of mine was killed in a mining accident one time. There were three of them, all people I knew, and none of them had even a smidgeon of mining experience but somebody hired them to sink a shaft and they were just collaring the shaft when the accident took place. Now I would like to know what maniac would hire three totally inexperienced people to sink a shaft. One of these guys was a pretty good talker and I can only imagine that is how they got hired.

Shaft sinking is probably the most dangerous job in the mines. I remember years ago when a company named Redpath sunk the Creighton number nine shaft which, at 7200 feet, was the deepest shaft in the western hemisphere at that time. They managed to do it without loss of life and that was considered in the mining industry to be quite a feat.

Anyway it was kind of a sad case. The chap had just gotten engaged. He lived for a week in the hospital before he died. One of the nurses told him one night that he was "just waiting there to die", and he phoned his parents the next morning, crying. I went to see him later that afternoon though and he didn't seem to be in too bad of spirits. He didn't mention to me though that they had told him the night before that he was going to die. He died the next morning. If a man is going to die I guess he has a right to know but I always thought that nurse was pretty damn miserable.

I had another friend who didn't make it out of those days. It had nothing to do with the mining industry. He had been in the army and had been a peacekeeper in Cyprus. It is said that ex-soldiers (and their children) have a problem with suicide. I have to be careful what I say here even these many years later. Suffice to say that he came to visit me one morning and he was very unhappy that his wife was thinking of breaking up with him. On the way home that day he bought a gun and early the next morning he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I worked in the mill at Copper Cliff for a while. Back at that time before Inco would hire you, they weighed you. A person had to weigh at least one hundred and forty pounds to work on surface for Inco and one hundred and forty five pounds to go underground. Well by that time I had lost my Charlie Atlas muscles from the grizzly and I was back down to one hundred and forty two pounds, which wasn't quite good enough to go underground for Inco. Anyway after being weighed I went into an interview with the guy in the hiring office and I guess he saw on my application that I had quite a bit of underground experience and so he asked me if I wanted to go underground. Well I should have kept my damn stupid mouth shut but I blurted out, "Well, I don't weigh enough to go underground". I guess the interviewer didn't give a damn despite the fact that I had quite a lot of underground experienced and at that point he just put me on surface at the Copper Cliff mill.

This did not work out too well. First of all the Copper Cliff mill worked around the clock seven days a week. And they were working a continental shift, which pretty much meant you had to work across the weekend. If I remember correctly you got one Saturday night off per month and once per month you got a Sunday, Monday and Tuesday night off which wasn't much good to a young single man full of piss and vinegar. It also seemed to me that because of the way the shifts were set up, one spent most of his days off work sleeping. Anyway as I said, I was a young single man and as far as I was concerned these shifts were beyond crazy. I guess I should have gone underground where Inco at that time only worked from Monday to Friday.

Another problem was that I had no concept of the seniority system of bidding for jobs. When I worked for the contracting company underground I pretty much just did what they told me to do and I had no reason to think that it would be any different at Inco. The concept that a person might get an easier and easier job as he got more seniority was foreign to me. And I would also have to say that the jobs in the mill were mind numbingly boring. At least underground one had the excitement of the very real possibility that he could become deceased at almost any time.

I had a little run in with one of the supervisors while I was in the mill. He gave me a job looking after this finely crushed ore that was being dribbled down into some sluice boxes and then into the mills. I had to make sure everything was running freely in this system and nothing was hung up. In retrospect it was a pretty good job and anybody except me probably would have been happy to keep his mouth shut and just do it. But for me, I managed to figure out that I could make one round of the system in about twenty-five minutes and when I went back the next time everything was still running free. So it seemed to me that I could take five minutes of every round sitting outside the mill and there would not be any problem when I went on my next round. And this brief respite outside would give me some relief from the noise of the mills. Well that lasted until the supervisor caught me sitting outside and summarily ordered me back inside. I was pretty unhappy about that because I knew the job was being done in a perfectly logical manner and to be blunt was being done well. I would have to say that that became a recurring theme in my working life. If my job was being done well, I expected supervisors to leave me alone.

On top of that, in my opinion, the pay was no hell at Inco at that time. It was $3.25 per hour and I still recall that after your deductions were taken off you cleared exactly one hundred dollars per week. Even in 1970 that wasn't, in my opinion, the best pay in the world. Of course in later years Inco did start to pay good money and an excellent pension for those who stayed. I guess when the orebody is under your feet it isn't so easy to move to a new location where labour costs are lower as happened to so many industries in Southern Ontario as a result of Free Trade and Globalization. Too bad I didn't have a crystal ball.

Anyway, hindsight is a hundred per cent. To this day my brother likes to get in a little dig at me regarding how I quit Inco. Maybe if I had gone underground for Inco, I might have stayed but I have no regrets about quitting the mill. And like I said I was working with the information I had at the time. For a few years (and just a few years) jobs were plentiful for those on the leading edge of the baby boom. To my mind there was a feeling of optimism in the country at large, and I don't think that many including myself saw the changes that were coming and how difficult it would become to find a good job.

Considering I spent so little time at the Copper Cliff Mill there was a chap who managed to get killed while I was there. I never saw the accident although I was very close to where it happened. He was a truck driver who was delivering a load of steel balls for the ball mills. Somehow or another on the ramp where the balls had to be unloaded the truck jackknifed and he got pinched between the tractor and the trailer killing him.

There was one kind of exciting job in the mill. Every now and again a whistle would sound and when this whistle sounded the nickel concentrate on the conveyor line would be rerouted to another conveyor line that would take it to a large storage bin. Before the concentrate went down into the bin it had to pass through a chute and a man had to be standing at the chute with a blowpipe making sure the concentrate was going through. Now it was said that if the chute ever plugged up, the platform on which the chute was located would start moving and if it reached the end of the storage bin it would flip upside down very likely killing the blow pipe operator who would be by that time very frantically trying to clear out the chute. The darn thing never did start moving on me but I can remember getting a bit panicky a couple of times when it looked like the chute was plugging up.

I was working at the Copper Cliff Mill when the tornado of 1970 went though. Actually I was on my way home from work and stopped at a red light on the western edge of Sudbury when it hit. The wind as you might expect was very strong and my car started rocking back and forth and the strength of the wind was forcing water in streams under the weather stripping around the windows into the car. I had a couple of other chaps with me and I recall one of them telling me not to move. Seeing as to how I couldn't see anything out of my windshield I had no intention of moving. About one mile from where I was, the tornado was picking cars right up off the road. Later I found out how bad it had been. It trashed the Copper Cliff Smelter which was right beside the mill in which I worked. In all six people were killed. It is classed today as being tied for eighth place among the deadliest tornados in Canadian history. I had crossed the path of the tornado on my way home from work. If the storm had hit a minute or two earlier or if I had left work a minute or two later I would have been directly in the path of it. At one place not far from where I was, it picked a half-ton truck up off the road. It landed one hundred and fifty feet away. The driver was killed.

The mines weren't that bad. I spent five years there. There were some good jobs underground and probably even more now as things have become more mechanized. I had managed to get a good education though and felt I should be using it for something. And besides there is a species of person that likes to strike out and do something different while others are quite content to get a job at the local mill or the local phone company or the local mine or whatever and just stay in one place. I guess I was one of the ones that likes to move on and try different things. I can't say I ever did better but I tried.

* * * * *

Before I leave Sudbury I should mention my very brief interaction with the mafia.

I had a good friend named Jim during my years in Sudbury and I suppose he remains a good friend to this day although we don't see each other very often nowadays. Jim's father was a bookie and rather a nice old fellow although in police records he was listed as being "armed and dangerous". I'll get to that part soon enough.

Jim's father told me once that he had bought a pool hall in Kirkland Lake during the Great Depression and he said that as a result he had all he wanted to eat and drink during the Depression. He left out the part about how he bought highgrade gold from the mines in Kirkland Lake and Timmins and silver from Cobalt and resold it in Montreal. His wife had told that story at a later date.

Anyway as a result of these activities he had become very wealthy and later in Sudbury owned a nice home in a rather exclusive area and owned several businesses and also owned a whole block of downtown Sudbury.

And he told me one time that in one of the stores he owned in the downtown Sudbury block there was a fellow named Frenchie who had a meat market there and one time Frenchie told him about a stock on the Toronto stock exchange that Frenchie said was going to go way up. So Jim's father bought some of this stock and sure enough up it went. And he continued, "Well after it went up, one day I decided to sell it and was walking down the street to the stock brokers to put in the sell order. But when I went by Frenchie's meat market, he came running out and asked me where I was going. Well, I told him I was on the way over to the stockbrokers to sell the stock and he said to me that we should phone down to Toronto to see if it was going to go up any more. So we phoned down to Toronto and they said it was going to go up a lot more yet, so I mortgaged my house and bought a lot more of the stock. Well, the bottom dropped out of it and I lost everything including the house, the whole block of downtown Sudbury and my other businesses. When it was all over I had twenty dollars left in my pocket and I said to the wife, 'Come on, we're going out to get drunk'"

This happened back in the 1950's, so twenty bucks was still quite a bit of money. I can recall going out myself in the late '60's and drinking draft beer which was only twenty cents a glass and had been ten cents a glass shortly before that. A person could get feeling quite good for two dollars.

Anyway I digress. After losing his fortune Jim's father needed a way to recoup his fortune and he then decided to rob a bank. Unfortunately he got caught and was hauled up before the judge. But like I said Jim's father had been quite wealthy and at one time he had traveled in the same social circles as the judge and they were quite good friends and of course the judge knew the whole story about how the fortune had been lost. Now as I said this happened during the 1950's which was pretty much a time when if you were caught robbing a bank they would lock you up and throw away the key but the judge was a friend, so believe it or not, Jim's father got off with a $500.00 fine. That was a pretty princely sum at that time but much better than many years in prison.

Anyway that is how Jim's father came to be listed in police records as being armed and dangerous although as I said when I knew him he was an old man and did not look particularly dangerous.

Afterwards Jim's father and his wife bought a small confectionery store and his father also ran a small bookmaking operation out of the back of the store or at least I think it was a small operation. Bookmaking was and still is so far as I know illegal but he was never bothered by the police for this latter day illegality so far as I know. A couple of times when Jim's father was sick, I accompanied Jim into downtown Sudbury and sat at a table having a beer while Jim made the rounds and paid off some of the gamblers who had made bets in his father's bookmaking operation.

Now it also happens that Jim's father had an illegitimate son back in Montreal who of course was my friend Jim's half brother. According to police records this half-brother was the third from the top in the Montreal mafia. This would have been back in the late sixties and early 1970's.

Anyway my friend Jim got married in the early 1970's and his half brother came to the wedding and brought along his body guard which caused a bit of a stir since it was pretty obvious that the body guard was carrying a pistol in a shoulder harness under his suit jacket. It's always interesting to go to a wedding where one of the guests is a mafia member and another person is armed.

Earlier in his life the Mafioso had come to Sudbury and worked briefly at the Inco nickel refinery. He said that one time he was standing at a railing looking down at boiling pots of copper below when someone had fallen from above him directly into one of the boiling pots. He said that when the chap hit the copper it was just like a match flaring up which only lasted a few seconds and then it was over. He said that he decided right then and there that he was quitting Inco and going back to Montreal.

He likely would have lived a longer life if he had stayed in Sudbury. In the early 1970's they had an Inquiry into Organized Crime in Quebec and he was found dead under somewhat mysterious circumstances the day before he was scheduled to testify.

These people were Italian of course, and just in passing, I should mention how innocently enough, I almost started a war in Sudbury's Italian community. One time in the early 1970's, I wanted to buy a car and had to borrow some money to do so. And the car dealership was Italian owned as well. As you probably know when they lend you money they invariably ask for a friend's name probably to help track you down if you disappear after borrowing the money. Now as it happened my friend Jim had the same name as his father and without thinking I gave this name as my reference and at this the car salesman exclaimed, "My God, don't you know that man is a bookie? Can't you give me another name?" So yeah, only I could do it, give a bookie as a reference for a loan.

Anyway I thought this was a rather humorous little story, so I of course I related it to my friend Jim who of course related it to his parents. To my shock and horror they did not find this story as amusing as I did and a mini-war erupted in Sudbury's Italian community complete with some mafia undertones.

And having made one digression I may as well make another. You see one time many long years ago I was thrown in jail in Sudbury myself. I went out with three other chaps into downtown Sudbury to play a game of pool. That ended well enough and about 9:30 P.M. we were on the way back to my car to go home. Now I did not participate in this but my friends started playing a stupid game of hide and go seek as they walked down the street. Now it was stupid because nobody was really hiding. It was just horsing around.

Now as I said I didn't participate in this game. I just walked around to the back of this building where my car was parked and waited for my friends. But unknown to me the door of this building was wide open and as part of this game of hide and go seek my friends entered the building.

There was a real estate office upstairs and the door was likely still open because there was a real estate agent upstairs working late. However, and here the plot thicks, there was also a doctor's office downstairs and darn it the doctor had left his door unlocked when he went home that night. And to make matters even worse there had been a rash of break-ins to doctors' offices in Sudbury about that time to steal drugs. And right across the road was a fire station and the good firemen of course did their civic duty by phoning the antics into the police.

So I was pulled over by the police on the way home. We were told to stay in the car and keep our hands in sight. Eventually another police car arrived and we were handcuffed two by two and taken to the police station. At the police station we were briefly questioned and then charged (with breaking and entering after dark) and thrown into the police lockup.

It was a rather uncomfortable night.. There were no mattresses on the steel slat bed and no other amenities in the cell other than a toilet. We were treated well enough though unlike one poor fellow. I couldn't see anything as there was brick wall between his cell and mine but during the night I could hear that a couple of police officers went into his cell and laid a beating on this chap. I have no idea what he did to deserve this treatment.

The next morning we were taken up to the courthouse in a paddy wagon. There was nobody there except us and a couple of down and outs and the guards of course, but we were in a rather jovial mood when we got out of the paddy wagon and were shouting, "No pictures. No pictures."

So then we ended up in front of the judge. There was a duty lawyer there to represent us and he asked for us to be let out on our personal recognizance as we lived in Sudbury etc. but the judge said, "No I'm sorry. This is a very serious charge. The maximum penalty is life in prison. Bail will be set at $3000.00." As my friends and I were being led through the bowels of the courthouse to the county lockup we were not so jovial.

Well we got our one phone call and my father bailed me out a couple of hours later. One of the other chaps got bailed out by his father about the same time. Another wasn't bailed out by his father until four days later. And the forth member of our cohort spent eleven days in jail until I managed to have his bail lowered and put up the bail money myself.

We spent four months out on bail. The other three fellows all hired lawyers. I didn't bother. I figured three lawyers working on the case was enough and they couldn't hardly let them off without letting me off as well. At the end of the four months they just dropped the charges.

Anyway I mention all this here because Jim's father and the judge were still friends and although Jim was not with us that fateful night he knew us all very well and indeed at that time I was probably Jim's best friend as he was to me, so through Jim, his father knew full well that we were not guilty of anything. So later Jim's father and the judge had a few drinks together and he told the judge what had happened. The judge told Jim's father that if in the future he had any personal knowledge of any case before him to let him know.

The other three chaps who were with me that night were all younger than me. One of them I have mentioned before committed suicide over forty years ago now; another got Lou Gehrig's disease and passed on about twenty years ago. I have lost track of the third member of the group.

* * * * *

These stories kind of put me in mind of the time Jim and I drove to North Bay kind of on a lark. And while walking down a street in North Bay, we somehow or another struck up a conversation with an older chap who seemed friendly enough. I always remember that the guys name was Blackie although he wasn't black, so far as I could see. Anyway, when Blackie found out who Jim's father was he pulled a pistol out of his pocket and started waving it around. He, of course, knew Jim's father from the old days but I can't say exactly what their connection was. Anyway, I'm not sure though that I was very comfortable around a guy waving a pistol around that I barely knew no matter how friendly he seemed.

* * * * *

Having broached the subject of high-grading I will tell the story of one high-grader that I met years ago and I wonder if he had done business with Jim's father back in the day.

He was my then girlfriend's stepfather and he told how one time he was working at the McIntyre Mine in Timmins during the 1930's and he got up to the face one morning and he saw a piece of gold as big as his fist up on the face. So he took an axe and cut an air hose in half and when his partner came in he sent his partner out to get another air hose. He then managed to pry the piece of gold down off the face and he hid it under some boards. He said it took him a week to get up enough nerve to take the piece of gold up to surface but he eventually did and he told me how much money he got for it. I can't remember the exact sum now but during the 1930's it was a very princely sum indeed, even enough to buy a house in those days. It was not to be though, because in those days he was a drinking man.

Later this chap joined the Canadian Army during WW II and as there was a need for miners to tunnel through the Rock of Gibraltar, that became his job during the War.

I include this quotation from CIM magazine: "The Rock (of Gibralter) was strategically crucial for the Allies because of its position at the mouth of the Mediterranean, giving them the ability to control naval traffic to and from the Atlantic. Strong defenses were therefore needed to protect the British stronghold from relentless bombing from above and from potential invasion on all sides, with the Italians to the east, the Germans on the Spanish border and Morocco to the south, which came under Vichy French control when France surrendered to Germany in June 1940."

This gentleman has passed away years ago now, as has my girlfriend's mother and my girlfriend as well.

* * * * *

And on another subject, again before leaving Sudbury, I had of course, developed a healthy interest in the opposite sex by the time I left Sudbury. And to tell just one story of this fascination, which I always thought was somewhat amusing, I was in one of Sudbury's finest establishments one time in the afternoon which was not my habit, being more of a night time drinker, but it was so on this one occasion and since it was in the afternoon, there were only two tables full of people in the whole place. I was seated with friends at one table whose names I cannot now recall and we were right next to the other table full of people although I did not know anyone at this other table. Anyway there was a young native woman at the other table and in the course of drinking a beer I had occasion to tell her that I thought she was attractive. "Do you really think so?" she asked and I replied that I really thought she was attractive and I was sincere and she looked into my eyes and she could see that I was sincere. And so she said to me, "Let's get up and dance" so I got up to dance with her and my recollection is that there were only one or two other couples on the dance floor. Well, she worked herself around on my nether regions until I became quite tumescent and then she stood up on her tiptoes and lowered herself such that we were conjoined at the hip by perhaps two inches through our clothing.. Anyway at the end of the dance after we had disengaged she walked out the door but there were washrooms on the other side of the door so I thought she had just gone to the washroom and would soon be back. I never saw her again. I will never know, of course, but I have always been suspicious that I had met a lady of the night. Regardless, I suppose she had a little laugh at my expense.

* * * * *

Having discussed my very brief interaction with the mafia above, I may as well tell of another very brief and tenuous interaction I had with some mafia figures. All the principals are dead now, so I guess I am free to tell stories.

Anyway I got to talking one time with a chap over a couple of beers and he told me that at one time, as a young offender, he had been incarcerated in a reformatory in Brampton. And he said that he didn't know how it happened but somehow or another he had allowed another young offender in there to convince him that he knew how to blow a safe. So they ended up back in Brantford and broke into a building and blew a safe. Well, I guess the "dynamite expert" put too much powder in or around the safe. My "friend" said that there was a guy on the other side of the wall, where the safe was, watching television and the explosion blew the safe right through the wall into the room with him.

They then ran downstairs to their getaway car and they couldn't get it started, so to make a long story short he ended up back in the slammer.

Anyway getting back to the mafia and some years after the above event this same chap started taking out a woman who had been the girlfriend of Johnny Papalia who was a rather well known mafia figure from Hamilton Ontario. Papalia had been caught smuggling drugs and they had made a movie about this entitled, "The French Connection". Anyway that's why my acquaintance was able to take out Papalia's ex-girlfriend since Papalia was in jail for smuggling drugs.

So my newfound friend told me, "I had to go down to Attica State Prison and see Papalia and ask for his permission to marry his ex-girlfriend". And he said that Papalia was pretty nice about it and told him to go ahead.

Anyway Papalia was eventually released from prison and that's when my acquaintance became a wheelman for the mob. He said one time Papalia asked him to drive him and another fellow to a place down in Buffalo. When they got there they told him to keep the car running and wait for them. My friend said that he had no idea what they did in there but when they came out he said they were on the run When he got them home Papalia gave him three hundred dollars and told him he had done "a nice job". I'm just guessing at when this happened but I would say sometime in the early 1970's and three hundred dollars was a fair chunk of money in those days.

After a few incidents like this my friend said that his wife (Papalia's ex-girlfriend) got bent out of shape over this and told him that what was going to happen was that sooner or later he was going to overhear something he shouldn't and he was going to end up dead. So he told his wife to call Papalia and tell him he didn't want to do it anymore. She did, so his career as a wheelman for the mob ended.

Papalia was murdered some years ago now (in 1997). He was shot in the head by a chap named Kenneth Murdock, and as for my "friend" well, one time quite a few years ago now, he was uptown and walked into a bar and dropped dead in the doorway.

* * * * *

And neither here nor there I suppose, but one time I was out having a drink in a Hamilton establishment and somehow or other got sitting beside a young chap who I recall was young, well-dressed and seemingly a friendly enough chap. So in a conversation with this fellow I asked him what he did for a living. He was quite reticent about this, but I kept bugging him as is my wont and finally he told me he had a loan-sharking operation. Now as you may know loansharks employ muscle in the operation of their business and frequently have mafia contacts as well, and so as friendly as this guy seemed I don't recall that I had much conversation with him afterwards. I do wonder exactly who he was and what his connections were.

Chapter 14: Shoulder Patch

Shoulder Patch

This shoulder patch was in father's kit bag. He would have worn it while serving with the First Special Service Force (the Devil's Brigade) during World War II. I have always thought that this shoulder patch appeared to be soaked in blood. I imagine that this would have happened when father was wounded near the end of the war.

* * * * *

In one of the many books written about the First Special Service Force, the author states that the First Special Service Force was thought by many to be a suicide squad. On reading this I asked father about it and he replied, "Yes, that's what they told me".

* * * * *

These are father's recollections from WW II. I have included these here because father died from the mines and I find it ironic and sad that a man who endured so much in a time of war eventually succumbed to an invisible killer in a time of peace.

Father served with the First Special Service Force during World War II and was attached to the American Army for all purposes except pay and record-keeping. As a result of this service in the American Army, father was awarded the U.S. army's Combat Infantry Badge. This was later converted to the Bronze Star but only for those past members of the F.S.S.F. who were still living. Unfortunately father had already passed on by that time.

Later the United States Congress awarded the First Special Service Force the Congressional Gold Medal. This is the highest civilian award for meritorious service that can be awarded by the U.S. Congress.

* * * * *

The Story of Gordon Stanley Hall from Hillsburgh, Ontario During WW II

It will be my purpose here to simply record the stories that father told of his service during WW II. I will tell them as they were told to me, and in some cases to others, while in my presence.

Father joined the Canadian Army in March 1941, and went overseas with the 100th A.A. Battalion from Guelph, Ontario. In England, he spent little time with this Battalion since it was over strength, and he was sent to the 2nd Heavy A.A. Battalion. Then in approximately April 1944, he was sent to a reinforcement battalion in Italy, and from there, chose to join the Royal Canadian Regiment. After spending about three months with the R.C.R. in Italy, he volunteered for service with a commando unit named the First Special Service Force or in the Canadian Army, the 1st Special Service Battalion or the 2nd Canadian Parachute Battalion. This combined Canadian-American group is presently better known as The Devil's Brigade because of the movie made about them called "The Devil's Brigade". The F.S.S.F. was disbanded in December 1944, and as a result, father was sent back to the R.C.R., with whom he remained until the end of the war (in Europe) on May 8, 1945.

Before going overseas father was stationed in New Brunswick. He recalled that he once went AWOL (away without leave of absence) and that after he had been AWOL for some time, he was returning to camp, and met three members of another unit, The Governor General's Horse Guard. Just in conversation, he told them that he had been AWOL, and was on his way back to camp to face the music. Despite the fact that he was returning to camp in any case, the three members of the Governor General's Horse Guard tried to put father under arrest. Father had a rather nasty look on his face when he said that these men did not manage to arrest him, and he subsequently returned to camp under his own steam. In the wee hours of the morning, however, he was awakened and arrested. He was charged with being AWOL, and with resisting arrest, and was not let out of prison until it was time to board the boat for overseas.

This boat was in a convoy, whose commander was Lord Mountbatten. So far as I know, the trip was uneventful. Many years later, however, he did say that he had a girlfriend while in England, and since she worked for the British government, she knew how many ships had been lost in the transatlantic crossing to German submarines. Father allowed that he might not have been in such a hurry to join the army, if he had known this number in advance.

The initials AA, as in the 100th A.A. Battalion and the 2nd Heavy A.A. Battalion, are pronounced Ack Ack and stand for anti-aircraft. Father recalled that he slept for some two years with his boots on because when the air raid sirens started to blow, he had to be up and running immediately. They used radar to shoot at the German aircraft, and father recalled shooting one down--a Heinkel 1-11, with five men on board, and a full load of bombs. He went to see the crash site afterwards, and said that there was a large crater, and that he had never seen so much blood in his life. Apparently there were houses nearby, and the gore was hanging off the houses.

During the very early period of father's stay in England, it was required that all armed forces personnel be prepared to wear a gas mask at any time, so it was necessary to carry a gas mask even when off the base. After some time however, an announcement was made over the radio that this would no longer be required, and accordingly father went to a bar just outside the army base on which he was stationed, without his mask. On exiting the bar however, a senior officer took father to task for not carrying his mask. Father tried to explain that it was on the radio all over England that this was no longer required, but the senior officer would not be deterred saying that it had not been officially announced yet on father's army base. Quite some time passed after this with no repercussions, and father felt that his transgression had been forgotten. The day came, however, when he was marched in to see the Commanding Officer. His explanations were to no avail and he was fined forty dollars.

His army pay was forty dollars per month, but half of this amount had to be sent home, so in effect his fine was two month's pay. Father was outraged by this, and said, "Well, I just made up my mind that if I could live two months without being paid, I could survive without being paid at all." At that time, the Legion in Erin sent father a carton of cigarettes a month, and his relatives sent him another carton. Also, he managed to buy an iron (a scarce commodity in those days), and apparently had quite a roaring business pressing uniforms for other soldiers. Thus, he was able to support himself through the black market in cigarettes, and through his ironing business. On hearing how father had refused to be paid after being fined, my brother, Bruce, commented rather gleefully, "Yeah, dad, you really showed them." There was no hint of a smile on father's face.

In Italy with the R.C.R., father recalled the "muddy season". Apparently, at a certain time of the year everything there turns to mud, and this gave rise to what he called the worst night of his life. They started to advance through the mud, and at night. The advance was very slow as they would only advance about six feet at a time, and then there was an interminable wait before the man in front of him advanced, and he could advance again. As this was going on, he was standing in deep mud, carrying a heavy pack and a rifle, which he was unable to put down because of the mud. I asked him where they were going, and why the advance was so slow. He replied that he never did find out. Father was to spend about three months with the R.C.R. in Italy. He once remarked that he thought Italy was a terrible place. He saw the leaning tower of Pisa, and he spent six weeks on the front line at a place called Rimini. The Rimini Line is one of the battle honours accorded to the Royal Canadian Regiment.

One night when they were encamped in Italy, someone heard noises in some nearby bushes, and father said that half the camp came out and started firing into the bushes. The next morning some of the men decided to look in the bushes and see what caused the noise they had heard. They found an old Italian woman who had been shot to death.

Father joined the First Special Service Force in August 1944. As I have previously stated this group subsequently became better known as the Devil's Brigade after the movie, by that name, made of them. It was an elite force, about one third Canadian and two thirds American. Father said that to join this outfit, you not only had to volunteer, but after you volunteered, they had to pick you. I have heard it said that other units in the Army liked to get rid of their discipline problems by sending them to the Special Forces and I have also heard it said that this is exactly the kind of person the Special Forces were looking for. Father did not have any serious transgressions against him but I would not doubt that he qualified as a discipline problem. As well, he had to sign a piece of paper stating that he was willing to jump by parachute, but in fact they never did jump into battle while he was a member of the unit.

He did, however, become a member of the First Airborne Task Force, a ten thousand-man group composed of the First Special Service Force, and two American commando units. They were charged with securing the right flank of the invasion forces at Normandy, by fighting through the area of the French Riviera to the Italian border. It is said that the Germans fought back tenaciously since at that time, they thought that the purpose of the task force was to push them into the Allied forces still fighting their way up the Italian peninsula.

When I was thirty-five years old, I returned home to visit mother and father in Kirkland Lake. At mother's suggestion, I went outside one morning to drink my coffee with father on the back lawn. I had no sooner than sat down in the lawn chair opposite father when he said to me, "Did the bombs ever look pretty when they blew up at night, red hot metal shooting out all over the place."

I did not expect him to say more, but he continued, "And one time, I was on the Mediterranean, right on the border between France and Italy, at a place called Menton, and the Navy came in and bombarded a mountain, and they set the whole mountain on fire. And the next morning, they sent myself, and nineteen other men, up on top of the mountain to capture it. Well, we managed to capture that mountain all right with no resistance because of the bombardment, and that was all right until the following morning, when the Germans counterattacked. And the first I knew we were being counterattacked, I was replacing another man on the machine gun, and they shot the other man through the heart."

I stopped father here because mindful of the fact that there were only twenty of them on top of the mountain, and one of their number was already dead, I wanted to know how many men the Germans had. "Well, I don't know," he replied, "but probably about a thousand."

He continued, "Well I can only remember two things about that day. The first thing I can remember is that in the excitement I forgot my canteen on the machine gun, and I can never remember of being so thirsty in my entire life. And the second thing I can remember is that the whole day went by so fast that it was getting dark outside, and I was wondering why it was getting dark. Well, the Germans managed to chase us down off that mountain all right, but by the time we got down to the bottom, there were only ten of us left alive. And there were hundreds and hundreds of men going up on top of the mountain to attack the Germans again. And the ten of us that were left alive were put in reserve at the bottom of the mountain. Well, that was all right until the following morning when the Germans attacked again, but instead of coming across the top of the mountain they came around behind. Well, I ended up in the middle of that one too, and by the end of that day there were four of us left alive. And of the sixteen men that died, three, including my lieutenant died right beside me. And of the four that survived, two had to be sent home immediately because they had nervous breakdowns. There was just me and the sergeant left (Sgt. Joe Dauphinais)."

At this point father said to me, "And I killed a German officer that morning." Innocently enough I enquired as to what rank of German officer he had killed. Father began to scream, "An officer! An officer!" I turned my head. The conversation was over. He could tell no more that day.

I wondered, however, how any of them had managed to escape, considering the considerable odds against them. Much later I was to ask him, and he allowed that on the first day they had been attacked, since they were right beside the sea, they had called in fire from the navy. He said that he never did go back to that place, but other people had reported to him that the Germans had left the area so quickly because of the shelling that they had left behind some of their gear.

Five years later, I was visiting my brother in Sudbury. Mother and father were there and also a friend of my brother's who was very interested in father's war career. Suddenly, father began to talk about the second of the two days during which they had been counterattacked by the Germans: "We had a machine gun set up every sixty feet, and a man in-between with either an M-1 carbine or a submachine gun. We slaughtered them that day." At this point, I could hardly believe my ears when my brother said, "Yeah dad, did you ever kill anyone?"

"Yes," father replied, "we were about to be attacked by a large force of Germans but our lieutenant wanted to go out and attack the Germans; so he got a bunch of us men together, and I followed him quite a long way into the German line when suddenly the lieutenant turned around and said, 'Where are the rest of those men?'" "Well," father continued, "I was the only one who was following him. And thank God, we never did go out and attack the Germans--we would have all been killed for sure. Anyway, the lieutenant went back to get the rest of the men, and he never told me to do anything, so I just stayed where I was. Well, I was only there a couple of seconds when a German officer came up above the rocks just ahead of me, holding a pair of binoculars up to his eyes. I shot him, and watched as he slowly collapsed, and a man on either side reached up to cushion his fall, so I guess I got him all right." Father then turned his gaze half way between my brother and myself, and he began to scream, "Are you happy now! Are you happy now!" There followed an embarrassed silence, which my brother's guest broke by asking an innocuous question.

I later came to understand that this event had occurred on the first of the two days during which they had been counterattacked. Many years later, father was to describe in more detail the second of those two days: "When I woke up that morning, we were being shelled by eighty-eights. It's a good job I had a safe place to sleep that night or I wouldn't be here. And when the eighty-eights stopped coming in, we could hear the small arms fire break out, so we knew we were being counterattacked, and I started running like crazy to get into the line. Well, my lieutenant was running about ten feet in front of me, and I watched as a bullet went into one side of his neck, and a big puff of blood came out the other side. Well, the lieutenant fell over dead. But for me, I could see where that bullet came from and where it came from there was a pile of rocks, so I ran and looked inside the rocks, and I could see a German officer in there. Well, I couldn't quite get my rifle in through those rocks to shoot him, but there was a man on a machine gun nearby, and I knew that man had a pistol, so I ran and got the pistol, and went back to the rocks, and put my arm in through and shot him."

He continued, "I always hated killing that man. We took some pictures off him afterwards, and he had a really attractive wife and two young children." But then his voice toughened and he continued again, "But after he killed the lieutenant (Lieutenant Paynton), he just had to die. And besides that, he was already up through our line behind the machine gun."

In 1991, in Hamilton, there was a reunion of the First Special Service Force and a group of them began to talk of those two days that I am describing. Father began talking with another man about this, and they talked of how, after the counterattack on the second day, a German soldier had stood up among the dead. He was waving a small piece of white cloth and he was screaming at the top of his lungs, "Comrade! Comrade!" He wanted to surrender, and father had covered him while this same man he was talking to, some forty-seven years later, had taken him prisoner.

In any case, some of these special services veterans spoke afterwards about father's experiences on those two days. As a result, a man (probably John Nadler who wrote the book "A Perfect Hell: The Forgotten Story of the Canadian Commandos of the Second World War") who represented himself as an author who had written many books and articles contacted father at Christmas in 1991. He asked father to tell him his story so that he could write about it. Father refused, however, to speak of these things. Often when father spoke of the war, he would become, understandably I believe, quite emotional, and I am not sure that he was able to sit down, and give a blow-by-blow coherent account of these matters. The material contained herein is a compilation gained through many years of patient listening.

There were other perhaps more mundane things that father described during this particular campaign. For example, he said once, that when they killed a German soldier, they took their medals and Luger pistols; then the French resistance took their rifles and grenades; and then, the civilians took everything else.

Also, at that time they were very near the principality of Monte Carlo which was a neutral territory during the war--a neutral territory filled with spies and agents of both sides. Father, however, said that he had gone through Monte Carlo during the war. Apparently, he had been hitchhiking, and had been picked up by some free French. Since the main roads went through Monte Carlo, and they had not wanted to take a detour, they just told father to keep his head down, and they had driven straight through.

About this time as well, he was in the city of Nice, and he spoke of going uptown and hearing a shot. He went to investigate and found a man lying dead in the street, and there was a large line-up of Frenchmen, all with pistols, filing past this dead man, and as each one passed the dead man, he fired a shot into the corpse. Then, father also saw a truck, and in the back of the truck there were six men. As he watched, an old woman got into the back of the truck, and took off her shoe, and she went to each of the six men and beat each one violently with the shoe, and when she was finished, she was so tired that she fell off the truck into the arms of the men below. Father inquired as to what was happening in this place, and he was informed that the man who was lying dead in the street was a collaborator who had tried to escape, and that the other men who were in the back of the truck were also collaborators, who were at that very moment being taken to a place on the outskirts of town to be shot.

In December 1944, the First Special Service Force was disbanded since a group specialized in such things as taking mountain strongholds was no longer needed as the war progressed. As a result, father was sent back to the Royal Canadian Regiment. He was wounded with the Regiment, but other than that said only that he had crossed the Rhine into Germany with the Regiment, and that they had been ordered back around immediately to attack the city of Apeldoorn in Holland. He said that from the part of Germany he had seen, Germany had been bombed so badly that were not two bricks left together.

I might mention here that father was probably somewhat fortunate at this point that he was sent back to the Canadian Army, since most of his American comrades in arms in the First Airborne Task Force, promptly ended up in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Father once remarked that, "You would sleep out in the snow at night and you would think that you would wake up feeling terrible, but you never felt better in your life." I never said anything, but I certainly thought how the memory could play strange tricks after all those years.

Once, when they were encamped in Germany or perhaps Holland, two Germans on bicycles came up to their camp just at dusk. The guard on duty said, "Halt", whereupon the two Germans threw down their bicycles, and fled across a field. Father always chuckled as he recalled, "The whole camp came out to shoot at them as they fled. Even the commanding officer was there, shooting at them with a pistol." The Germans got away. They were too far out of range for anyone to hit them.

Also in this area, he recalled approaching a farmhouse, and a tank put a shell into the house, thinking that the Germans might be hiding there. After the shell exploded, a woman holding a baby in her arms came running out of the house to a nearby woodpile. Not seeing her, the tank then proceeded to put a shell into the woodpile, whereupon the woman, still with the baby in her arms, ran back into the house. Still not seeing this, the tank put several more shells into the house. No one would go into the house and check on them afterwards, and as they left the area, all they could hear was the crying of the baby.

Another event that occurred about this time, either in Germany or Holland, involved the shooting of a German soldier in the foot. "We were in a small village, and I was crouched down beside a building when I saw two German soldiers come around the corner of the building carrying a Canadian soldier in a stretcher. I kept watching for the Canadian soldier who must be guarding them, and as I was watching, a bullet went by my head, and I saw it plough into the foot of one of the German soldiers. He immediately dropped the stretcher, and began to hop around on one foot screaming in pain. At this time, the Canadian soldier guarding them came around the corner, and upon seeing the antics of the German soldier screamed, 'What's the matter with you?' The German soldier pointed to the blood oozing from his foot, whereupon the Canadian soldier leveled his gun at the hapless German and screamed, 'There's nothing wrong with you! Pick up that stretcher and get moving!' The German soldier quickly complied."

On hearing this story, I was not quite sure if perhaps the German soldier was acting smart, and the Canadian soldier had shot him on purpose, so I asked father about this. "No.", he replied, "There were bullets flying around all over in that place. They may have been shooting at me, or it may have been just a stray bullet."

There were more serious memories of this time, such as this one: "An armor piercing shell went through Company Headquarters, and took the Commanding Officer's head right off (Captain F.J. Sims). And after that, our remaining officers were all camped in one building, and a shell landed on that building killing many of them outright, and many of those that were not dead were so badly wounded that they had to be sent home immediately."

"And so it was," he continued, "that when we were approaching Apeldoorn many of the men were heard to remark that they could remember coming out of battle a few times with no officers, but that they could never remember of going into battle with no officers.

Father never quite made it to Apeldoorn. I was perhaps thirteen years old when he told this story. The next door neighbour was visiting, and he and father were having a beer. The neighbour asked father if he had seen much action during the war. "Quite a bit." father replied, and then asked, "Do you know how I was wounded?"

He continued, "It happened near Apeldoorn in Holland. We were walking behind tanks, walking single file, in the tank treads to avoid land mines. Suddenly, the Germans started shooting at us with mortars. We all jumped for the ditch, and the mortars came down all around us for half an hour. And when the mortars stopped coming in, we started getting back up out of the ditch, and believe it or not, not one single man was wounded or killed by the mortars. It was then that they opened up on us with 88's. I jumped for the ditch again, but it was too late." Father was wounded by shrapnel in the left chest and the right knee. It was April 13, 1945, just three and a half weeks before the end of the war (in Europe) on May 8, 1945.

Father's trip to the hospital became an ordeal. There were four of them in the ambulance, and also, a wounded German soldier who was well enough to be holding a bag of blood up for a wounded Canadian soldier. I asked father who was guarding the German soldier, and he replied that no one was. Apparently at that late stage of the war, it was not necessary. It was never safe to ask father too many questions. In any case, as they approached a railroad track, there was a train coming toward them, and the ambulance accordingly stopped. The train, however, also stopped. Several times afterwards, the ambulance started to go, and when it started, the train also started to proceed. Eventually they came to a stop with the train up against the ambulance, and the ambulance up on two wheels. They had to call another ambulance to take father and the other men to the hospital.

On leave in Amsterdam, father got into a card game and had a few drinks. Afterwards, he exited the club in which he had been. It had been raining, and because of this, the canals looked exactly the same as a paved road would look, if it were wet, and father proceeded to walk directly into a canal. He had to be rescued, and counted this as one of his closest calls with death during the war.

Father worked in the mines after the war, at Kirkland Lake, Virginiatown, Elliot Lake, Levack, Bancroft, Sudbury, Manitouwadge and finally, returning to Kirkland Lake. He once told this story: "One of the first jobs I had when I got out of the army was working in a gold mine in Kirkland Lake. And every day, I had to come down out of the stope to get water for myself and my partner to drink. And every day in the course of doing his duties the cagetender would walk behind me. And so every day, I would shut the water off and turn around and face him until he left. But then one day I said to myself, this is crazy; the war is over; I can't go on living my life turning around and facing whoever walks behind me, so I decided to just stay there and keep pouring the water. Well I kind of blacked out, and when I came to, I had the cagetender down on the ground, pounding the hell out of him, and he was screaming at the top of his lungs, 'What did I do? What did I do?' And it was a good job he was screaming that or I probably would have killed him".

Father died September 8, 1998. We filed a Workers' Compensation claim for him, and they agreed with us that he had died because of poisoning from radon gas, mostly from the uranium mines, but also from the gold mines. The minister came to visit, and he wanted to hear our memories of father. Both Uncle Jim and Aunt Ethel were there. They both remembered how happy everyone was, when father came home from the war.

* * * * *

As I have said, I have included the story of father's wartime service here because I find it both ironic and sad that after having endured so much during a time of war father died from the mines in a time of peace. What follows are postscripts that I wrote some years after writing about father's wartime experiences. These have less to do with the mining industry and I had thought of deleting them from this work but in the end decided to include them as a bonus section. I hope you find them interesting.

Postscript I (June 2009)

In 1956 father began working for Faraday Uranium Mines in Bancroft, Ontario. His partner underground, Kurt, was a chap who had served in the German army during WW II. Kurt, his wife Marta and their daughter Sylvia practically became part of our family. They were welcome guests coming to our home at any time without notice. I remember a time when I was perhaps twelve or thirteen years old and father and Kurt were sitting in the kitchen of our home in Bancroft and agreed with each other that a little spell in the army wouldn't do me any harm as it would teach me discipline. This was pretty strange stuff coming at the same time from an ex- Canadian soldier and an ex-German soldier. I remember one Christmas when I was perhaps ten or twelve years old going out into the bush to get a Christmas tree with father and Kurt. Kurt was a nice guy. Back in those days I loved to get out fishing. Father wasn't much of a fisherman but Kurt took me fishing several times. Kurt and Marta are both gone now. Sylvia is the President of a college in Northern Ontario (and now retired).

I reached high school age in 1961, sixteen years after the end of WW II. I had a teacher who was German and had worked on the V1 and V2 rockets (aka the buzz bomb or doodlebug) that the Germans had used to attack England. I told father about this and he said that if someone had told them in the army that Germans would be teaching our kids in school we would have told that person that he was crazy. It kind of seems to me that that teacher kept a fairly low profile. He taught geography and history. Somehow we never did quite make it up to WW II in our studies of history. I recall one time in class when the subject of father's war service came up. The teacher abruptly changed the subject. Anyway I learned about the Kings and Queens of England, and believe it or not, about Canadian pride in the victory at Vimy Ridge from this chap who scant years before had been an enemy and whose ancestors were quite decidedly on the other side at Vimy Ridge. I thought he was a good teacher and I liked the guy.

April 2018: This is my former teacher's obituary. I have shortened some names: "K. Ralph - Died peacefully in Woodstock Hospital on 16 March 2012 at the age of 87 with all his family and his closest friend present. Survived by his wife Sonja, his sons and daughter-in-laws Michael and Valerie, Roland and Sarka and Christian and Sharon and his 5 grandchildren; Kristofer, Mitchell, Dakota, Montanna and Marco. Predeceased by his mother Marie Pahlke in 1947, his father G. Kahler in 1972 and his younger brother K. Kahler in 1999. R. Kaehler was born 15 Oct 1924 in Bartenstein, Germany but was raised in Knigsberg, Germany. In 1942 he finished High School enrolling in the Albertus University in Knigsberg to study law but on his 18th birthday he was drafted into the German Army and did not get to go to Albertus University. After military training he was posted to Peenemunde, Germany. At the end of the war he worked for American Intelligence in the G2 section where he became the administrator of the Landshut Housing Project, a staging area for scientists contracted by the Americans to move to the USA. While working in Landshut he met his future wife, S. P., at the Post Office of the housing area they both lived in. There he also met T. R., who would become a lifelong friend. In 1953 he immigrated to Canada and worked at the Standard Tube Ltd. as a clerk in the accounting department and then as the paymaster. In 1958 he moved to Bancroft, Ont to teach history and German at North Hastings High School. His future wife S. P. arrived in Canada 2 Aug 1959 and they were married 21 Aug 1959 in the Bethany Lutheran church in Woodstock, Ont. They lived for the next 42 years in Bancroft where they raised their three boys. In 1986 he retired after 28 years of teaching and in 2001 they sold the house and moved into an apartment in Woodstock, Ont. For many years his hobbies have been stamp collecting, reading economic and political news periodicals, playing skat with his friends and travelling all over Europe and North America".

This is taken from Wikipedia regarding Peenemunde during WW II," The community is known for the Peenemünde Army Research Center, where the world's first functional large-scale liquid-propellant rocket, the V-2, was developed".

I note that the moving of German scientists to the U.S. from Landshut was part of Operation Paperclip, so it would appear that my former teacher played a part though quite possibly an unknowing part in Operation Paperclip.

This is taken from Wikipedia regarding Operation Paperclip, "Operation Paperclip was a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) largely carried out by Special Agents of Army CIC, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to America for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959. Many were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party".

Operation Paperclip remains controversial to the present day.

Postscript II (April 2010)

And now I would like to write a sort of postscript to the postscript. It may be a bit esoteric and perhaps not for everyone. If it becomes too esoteric for you I give you full permission to stop reading at any time. I would like to describe some events that took place mainly in the fall of the year 2008.

First let me describe myself a bit pertaining to matters of religion and faith and any afterlife that there may or may not be. I left the church at the age of fourteen in 1961 for reasons that are not important now. Suffice to say that in the intervening years I have returned to church only for the purposes of attending weddings and funerals. I would describe myself as being not atheistic but rather agnostic – that is to say that I just do not know. In addition, I always found church to be somewhat boring and not entirely relevant to my day-to-day life. I was not against religion in any sense, just disinterested. Religion was just not a big part of my life (and still isn't).

I shall skip forward now to the spring of the year 2000. I was fifty-three years old at the time and found myself in that year in a short-term job as a maintenance welder in a cement plant. At the time, I had a friend who I will call Jack. He was not a close friend but a likeable person and a friend nonetheless. Jack was seriously ill in the hospital and had been in this seriously ill state and in the hospital for about one year. To be fair, I had heard some rumours that Jack was drawing closer to death. However, I was not prepared for what happened at the time of his passing.

What happened is that one day I went to work and was climbing up on a cement truck to do some welding when I very suddenly and strongly felt Jack's presence. I did not see Jack but I felt that he was there and I said (not out loud but rather in my mind), "Is that you Jack?" Jack replied, "Yes, it's me. I've just passed away." To this I replied, "Whoa, whoa Jack, don't talk like that." Jack replied, "No, it's too late. I've just come to say goodbye." And then he was gone.

As I said above I could feel Jack's presence and as this short conversation was taking place I could feel what he was feeling and what he was feeling was a mixture of exhilaration and excitement. Jack was very happy and he was in a hurry to continue on his journey.

When I came home from work that night I was certain that Jack had passed away and accordingly I phoned some friends of Jack's to get the news. I was told that Jack had not passed away and this puzzled me because I still felt that he had passed on. However, when I came home from work the following day these same people called me and told me that Jack had indeed passed away the previous day and that he had passed away about the time of my "visitation". I was not surprised.

I shall jump forward now to the fall of the year 2008 when I was sixty-one years old. Things were pretty good for me in the fall of 2008. I had made quite a large sum of money on the stock market during the preceding months such that I felt I was retired or at least semi-retired. I didn't have to work and as I rather happily went about my business at that time, I frequently said to myself that during this latter part of my life I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. In fact I repeated this over and over to myself so many times that it became a sort of mantra: "I just want to do what I want to do". I did not want to be a slave to ideas that I had in the past or the necessity to work that I had in the past. I wanted to relax. I wanted to take life easy. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. Alas, it was not to be. The stock market collapsed and took me down with it. I went back to work. What is important though is that I had this mantra, "I just want to do what I want to do".

Now it happens that near Brantford there is a lady who is reputed to be a psychic and she has given readings for quite a long time. I had heard of her before and when some people I knew went to see her I decided that just as a matter of interest I would go and see her too. And being the person that I am, I did a wee bit of computer research on this lady before I went to see her. I found out that she was the minister of a church and her basic modus operandi was to "talk" to people who had passed away and convince the person before her that she was indeed talking to these spirits so that this person would then believe in an afterlife and thus be led to a belief in Jesus Christ.

Now I was pretty incredulous about this and did not in any way expect to be convinced. I was going to this psychic for entertainment value only. However, before I went to see this lady I said to myself that if she really could talk to the departed then for sure she will talk to father because father as you may surmise by reading the above had a rather forceful personality and if any spirit were going to come through, it would be father.

And so I went to see the psychic. I had hardly sat down in the chair opposite her when she said the names of my mother, one sister, my brother and my ex-girlfriend and said these were the people who were close to me. Later she spoke of the one who is a nurse (my other sister) the one who is a police officer (my nephew) the one who is into books (my niece who now has a PhD and is a University Professor) and the one with the horse (my other niece who is now a Veterinarian). For the record she had by this time mentioned my mother, all of my siblings and all of my nieces and nephews save one.

She spoke also of a lady relative who died of cancer. I didn't get that one at the time but yes indeed I had forgotten an aunt who had passed not too long before from cancer. She also spoke of a friend named Don who had passed. I told her I didn't know anyone named Don who had passed. She became quite upset with me and started shouting, "Don, Don, you know Don." It was about a week later when I was out in the bush taking pictures that I remembered a fellow that I had been quite friendly with at one time who had passed away about a week before I saw the psychic. His name was Don. And I also had another friend named Don who had died in the mines years earlier.

I go out and play euchre at night and many of the euchre players are quite elderly and prone to passing on. In one grouping, the psychic gave the names of the last people who had died from the euchre games. One was named Irene and another was Jan. She said, "I don't know if her name was Janet or Janice. People just called her Jan." And she was quite right. I used to give Jan a ride out to the games the odd time since she lived in the same apartment building as I do. Everyone just called her Jan.

And then the psychic said to me, "I have a man here in a soldier's uniform. Yes, he is a Second World War soldier. Who is that man?" Perhaps I shouldn't have told her who I thought it was but I said, "It must be my father." She said then, "Your father wants to tell you that he is in a good place". And then it came. She said, "Your father has a message for you." And then she raised her eyebrows and stared at me as though she was telling me something very important and said to me, "He says to tell you to do what you want to do." And so as incredible as it may seem my father who had passed away some ten years earlier had through the psychic, given me the precise words of the mantra that I kept repeating to myself at that time.

As a result, my meeting with the psychic became somewhat emotional although she did not understand why. Was it a coincidence? Perhaps. But if it was a coincidence, there were a lot of coincidences during my meeting with the psychic. I think I will go back and see her sometime again but in some ways I am afraid. Perhaps I am afraid of another emotional experience. Perhaps I am afraid of the unknown. The psychic said father was coming in close "to reassure me". I have some questions I want to ask her about some other things in my life. In one way I have been reassured for I have a certainty of an afterlife that I never had before.

Anyway, make of it what you will. I promised you something esoteric. I hope I haven't disappointed.

Postscript III

I have taken this from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission:

Name Rank Service Number Date of Death Age Regiment / Service Service Country Grave /

Memorial Reference Cemetery / Memorial Name

PAINTON, ROBERT JAMES Lieutenant 13/09/1944 22 Canadian Special Service Battalion, R.C.I.C. Canadian Plot 4. Row C. Grave 59. MAZARGUES WAR CEMETERY, MARSEILLES

I have often wondered about this man. As related above, they were about to be attacked by a large force of Germans but he wanted to go out and attack the Germans. He was twenty-two years old. Rest in Peace.

Postscript IV (March 2015)

Joe Dauphinais who survived the two days of fighting on the twelfth and thirteenth of September, 1944 with father has written (in French) about the twelfth of September 1944 and this can be found on the internet. I have also had some email conversations with Joe Dauphinais' daughter to clarify some aspects of this. I believe that I can give a somewhat more detailed account of the events of twelve September 1944 by drawing on these resources.

First, as Joe Dauphinais recounts, when they sent a party out under the command of the Lieutenant to attack the Germans they did so because they did not know that the Germans were in strength. It was during this sortie that father shot the German officer who was holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes. According to Joe Dauphinais they had three men killed out of the eight men who went on this sortie.

Second, father did not mention it, but Joe Dauphinais makes it clear that the attack by the Germans went on for at least three hours and as he states the attack lasted from 08:00 to 11:00 o'clock. During that time the intensity of the attack was such that their guns seized up because of inferior ammunition (according to Joe Dauphinais' account in the book, "Black Devil Brigade" by Joseph A. Springer. Because of the bombardment the day before, however, the Germans had left a large number of guns behind and on the foresight and command of Joe Dauphinais these German weapons had been gathered into their position. When their guns seized up they then resorted to using these German weapons for defense.

Joe Dauphinais describes the battle in these words, "The battle is very intense. The German force is estimated at 250 men. They arrive out of nowhere and are very determined to reclaim the peak." (Translated from the original French)

Both father and Joe Dauphinais agree that the Germans abandoned their attack only after fire from the navy had been called in.

Joe Dauphinais did not go on to describe the events of 13 September 1944.

Postscript V (January 2018)

As I have said before, we were not a particularly religious family. Many years ago after father had turned sixty-five and retired, I was visiting my parents in Kirkland Lake. Mother was out and a man came to the door. He and father spoke very intently for about a half-hour and then the man left and I asked father, "Who was that man?" to which he replied, "A minister". And then I asked, "Why was he here?" to which father replied, "Because I asked him to come".

Some years later after father had passed on, I was describing this event to my sister and my brother-in-law. My sister asked, "Well, why did he come?' to which I replied, "I don't know." and then quickly added, "Mind you, I always thought it had something to do with the war". My brother-in-law quickly added, "That was the first thing that came to my mind".

Postscript VI

I am sure it will come as no surprise to you that I have occasionally mentioned some of my father's deeds during the war when in conversation with others.

On mentioning to one woman how father had killed a German Officer with a pistol she exclaimed, "A pistol. That's like hand to hand combat". I told her that I thought they were getting kind of close which they probably were.

And I mentioned the same incident to another chap one time, and received the following shocked response, "Your father did that? I'm not kidding. That's a terrible thing to kill a man with a pistol. You're right up close to him and you watch him die".

Postscript VII

When mother and father had their fortieth wedding anniversary we had a party for them in Kirkland Lake. I sat beside my aunt (father's sister) for a bit and at one point, she turned to me and said, "It was the best thing for your father to get married when he did". She continued, "Shortly after he got home from the war, we took him to a dance in Guelph and what I saw there, oh no, oh no...". As she said, "oh no, oh no" she had a pronounced frown on her face and turned her head from side to side.

* * * * *

These quotes are taken from the short doc: "Victory Remembered: Legacy of the Black Devils".

"Some people had questions about why their fathers were the way they were. Well coming here (to Italy to see the places of battle) has brought them closer to answering those questions that they grew up with."

"....at unpredictable times there were outbursts of unexplainable anger, maybe rage. It was difficult and we didn't know, we didn't understand as children. The other day I had the honour and privilege to climb to the top of Mount (unintelligible) and at the top I looked over the side, and I said 'I understand now' and I forgive my father his rage.

Postscript VIII

I bought two houses years ago and I had next door neighbours beside both houses who were WW II vets.

The one chap was Scottish and had been an aircraft mechanic during the war. He had served in the English army in Africa and he once told me, "Yeah, Rommel pushed us around pretty good in the desert until the Americans came in and they cleaned them up fast enough".

And the other chap told me his war story as well. He said that he had been in charge of an officers' mess in England. "Hell" he said, "I had more booze than any general in the Canadian army". And he had managed to do that for quite some time when the order came for him to go to the continent where of course the war was raging for real and he was likely going to end up in combat.

"Well" he said, "I decided not to go and I went AWOL until the war was over". "I wasn't a deserter" he said, "because I continued wearing my uniform".

"And then", he said, "the war ended and I knew I had to turn myself in and face the music". I think he was figuring on spending a couple of years in the stockade for his poor behaviour. "Anyway, he continued, "I was getting on a bus to go and turn myself in and a general I knew from my days in charge of the officers' mess was getting off the bus and I got talking to him and told him what I had done and that I was on my way to face the music and he said to me to call him as a character witness for the trial".

"Well", he said, "that's what I did and the court that was trying me didn't have the authority to call in a general in to testify, so I got off scot free on all charges".

The next time I visited with my parents I told them this story and my mother asked how he could have supported himself if he had continued to wear his uniform. At this my father just laughed and said, "Those guys usually had a couple of women working for them".

So the next time I saw my next door neighbour, I asked him how he had managed to support himself if he had continued wearing his uniform. "I had a couple of women working for me" he replied.

Postscript IX

I knew a chap who was taken into a Russian POW camp at the end of WW II. He said that at age 15 he was too young to fight in the war. His father was taken into the same camp as him and he said his father had been too old to fight during the war. I forget now the number of inmates he said died but it was very high. His father died in the camp. They had only a slit trench with a log near it to sit on when they went to the bathroom, so they had to hold themselves out on the log to go to the bathroom. Dysentry was rife in the camp and he said most of them died when they got too weak to hold themselves up on the log while going to the bathroom and once they fell over into the trench they were too weak to get back out, so they died in the feces below. He also told me that there was a women's camp next the camp he was in. I asked him how the women made out. He replied, "Oh, they died too." He said that the Americans made the Russians release him and others after one year as he was too young. He managed to cross over to the American side after his release and tried to find an Aunt he had in Berlin. He couldn't find the Aunt and he eventually immigrated to Canada.

I also knew a German chap who had been in the Tank Corps at Stalingrad. He made it out of Stalingrad because he had been wounded early on, so he had been transferred back to Germany at a time when they still had supply lines through. Talk about million dollar wounds.

Postscript X

I was working in a factory as a welder one time years ago and at coffee break got talking to another chap in the department. I told him that my father had been in the Royal Canadian Regiment during WW II and he told me he had been in the 48th Highlanders (a sister regiment to the Royal Canadian Regiment). He went on to say that he had started out in the artillery but that he had transferred into the infantry. He said that at the time he had thought maybe he was crazy for transferring into the infantry but that afterwards the artillery unit he had been in had been involved in a friendly fire incident in which they had been bombed by the Americans, and many of the men in his former unit had been killed, so he thought that maybe he had made the right choice after all.

The following day I was welding at my station and upon flipping up my helmet at one point I found this chap standing beside me, and upon seeing that I had seen him he said, "I want to tell you something".

He said, "I want to tell you the way it was during the war. When you moved up you had an objective and when you took your objective, you just stopped, and then the next unit moved up though your line to take their objective. Well, I never saw much action during the war. Every time we moved up the Germans were already gone".

"But those RCR's," he said, "every time they moved up, they ran right into the Germans".

And with that he walked away from me. We never discussed the war again.

Postscript XI

Father once told a story about how when in Italy with the Royal Canadian Regiment, he was told by an officer to pick one other man and go to a nearby well and fetch water for the troops. "Well" father said, "we had a man in the outfit who was very afraid and I decided to pick him to go and get the water with me".

"There were eighty-eight shells flying overhead at the time," he said, "but they were going overhead, so they wouldn't hurt anything".

"This man I had picked to go with me was very afraid though. And when we got back with the water, I was called in to see the Commanding Officer and he gave me proper hell for picking this man to go with me".

I once had occasion to speak with a WW II vet who had served with the Governor-General's Horse Guard and he told me that in the regular Canadian army they got rid of their discipline problems by sending them to the Special Forces. Thinking of the movie, "The Devils' Brigade" I told him that I thought he was thinking of the American Army and not the Canadian Army. "Oh no" he insisted, "the Canadian Army did the same thing".

I wouldn't exactly say that father was a discipline problem but he did have a mind of his own and he wasn't afraid to speak it and some stunts like the one above probably didn't help. He did, of course, volunteer to go to the FSSF but chances are that they weren't too sorry to see him go (from the Royal Canadian Regiment).

I asked father one time why he had decided to join the FSSF (which was in the American Army) and he replied rather succinctly, "The food was better."

There is a bit of a story here. During the war they fed the Canadian troops on mutton that was coming out of Australia. Now this was mutton not lamb and I guess it was pretty awful stuff. Most of the returning Canadian soldiers would not allow either mutton or lamb into their houses after the war and certainly our house was no different.

To compound matters father had always had a bit of a weak stomach, so he frequently threw up after eating mutton.

I read in one of the history books one time that the FSSF was known as a "suicide squad". I mentioned this to father and he agreed that that is what he was told. It seems that the mutton must have been pretty bad given that joining a suicide squad was preferable to continuing to eat it.
Chapter 15: Denouement – Southern Ontario

In the early seventies there was a slowdown in the mining industry. The rebuilding of post-war Europe was over as was the rebuilding of North America after the war and the Great Depression. In addition the Vietnam War had ended. The result was less need for metals. Also the unions wanted Inco to phase out the mining contractors. I suppose the unions wanted good dues paying members working in "their" mines. In addition at one time any ore that came out of a mine in the first three years came out tax-free, so the mining companies would hire a contracting company to get the ore out as quickly as possible. The contracting companies could do this because they hired employees like me who worked six and seven days a week and sometimes more whereas the unionized employees pretty much just worked a forty-hour week. I suppose the fact that the contractors, at least the one I worked for, were having quite a few fatalities wasn't much in their favour either. Whatever the reason, I found myself unemployed and on unemployment insurance (now Employment Insurance) in Sudbury in the early 1970's.

Sudbury wasn't that big of a town and there was almost no surrounding area as there might be, for example, in southern Ontario where if there were no jobs available in Guelph then one might look for work in Kitchener or maybe Cambridge which are both pretty close to Guelph. And I like to think that I pretty much had my finger on the pulse of what was going on in Sudbury and I didn't think there were any jobs available in Sudbury at that time and I haven't changed my mind in the intervening years. And so I basically just collected EI and waited for some change in the situation or some opportunity to come along. I did however go to Ottawa and write the civil service exam.

And that lasted until early one morning when my mother shouted into my bedroom to get up because there was a man from the Employment Insurance there to see me. I had no advance warning of this whatsoever but did manage to struggle out of the bedroom half-asleep and sit myself down in front of this chap who then proceeded to ask me a series of questions. And I pretty much knew that the main question concerned where I had looked for work. Well not having had any time whatsoever to prepare for this I had to tell him that the only thing I had done to look for work was to go to Ottawa and write the civil service exam. The chap dutifully wrote all this down and then left. I must say that this event happened nearly forty years ago now and I have never heard of anyone else who was woken up early in the morning by a representative of the Employment Insurance and interrogated in their home.

In any case, I pretty much knew that my one attempt at finding work was not going to be good enough for this fellow, so I knew that I was going to be cut off Employment Insurance.

That, of course, raised the problem of having to support myself in some way and I had heard some rumours that there was work available in southern Ontario, so I determined that I would have to go to southern Ontario and look for work and having arrived there I did find some factory work soon enough. At the time I felt this was temporary and I would eventually move onto something else but for a variety of reasons factory work became more or less a permanent type of employment for me.

However, I had only been down south for about a week when the phone rang at my parents' house in Sudbury. Mother answered the phone and it was a man from Ottawa who said that he wanted to speak with me because he thought he had a job for me in the civil service in Ottawa. Mother told this fellow that I was in southern Ontario looking for work. "That's fine," the fellow replied and he hung up never to be heard from again.

As I mentioned above I have never heard of anyone else who was woken up in the morning and then interrogated by a representative of the EI. Nor have I ever heard of a representative of the EI going to anyone's house. If the EI has any questions for anyone they generally send a letter in the mail asking the EI recipient to come to their office for an interview and the person generally has a week or two to prepare and if they wish may even secure some representation. I heard through the grapevine that the EI representative who came to interview me was an ex-RCMP officer who was out to make a name for himself and I guess he made a name for himself by cutting me off. I hope he had a good life. I think I could make a pretty good case that he ruined my life or at the very least put me on a path where the possibility that I would achieve success in life was very much diminished if not completely choked off.

I worked in various factories in southern Ontario making everything from combines to playground equipment to garbage trucks. The longest place of employment lasted fourteen years before they went out of business. There was never a fatality at this particular factory. The closest to a fatality I ever heard about there was a fellow who fell into a vat of paint. About one-third of a person's "breathing" is done through the skin and if the skin is covered with paint it is possible for a person to suffocate to death. From what I heard this fellow very nearly suffocated before they got him cleaned up.

At another factory where I worked they had one fatality just before I started and two just after I started. There was somewhat over a thousand people working for this employer. Of those who were killed my understanding was that one of them was run over by a forklift and another had the flywheel come off the top of a press and hit him while they were working on the press. And the third fatality happened when a chap allowed scrap material to build up around the shears. Some of this scrap material had sharp edges and at one point the shears came down and caught some of this material shoving it into his abdomen killing him.

I worked in one factory where they made railroad cars. I was there twice – in 1972 and again in 1988. In the intervening years they had had one fatality that I know of. The railroad cars had couplings on them and in order to attach one car to the other and move it they would ram the cars together to connect the couplings. And one time they were ramming the cars together just as a fellow was passing between the two cars and unfortunately he was squeezed between the two couplings. He was still alive but they knew he was going to die as soon as they separated the couplings. I was told that they went and got his family to come and say goodbye. I don't recall that when they moved the cars back in 1972 there was a lot of fanfare but the second time I worked in that factory in 1988 there sure were a lot of sirens going off and lights flashing when they rammed the railroad cars together to couple them.

I did tax returns for farmers in the spring of 1973 after working for the railroad car manufacturer for only four months. I saw quite a bit of the country in that job. I started in Cornwall and spent two months working in that area and then I was off to other areas. I spent a week or so near Ottawa and then went up to the (Northern Ontario) claybelt starting near Kirkland Lake and working my way south of North Bay and then west to Sudbury. Then I came further south and worked pretty much from one end of twenty-four highway to the other from north of Guelph to the shore of Lake Erie.

One time while I was doing this job I was on seventeen highway heading form Sudbury to Cornwall and since Cornwall is on highway 401 I somehow had to cross the country between highway seventeen and the 401. I decided that I would just look for a sign to point me in the right direction and it wasn't long before I passed a small sign on the side of the road that pointed towards Cornwall and I decided to take that route. Well I got down that road quite a few miles when I came to a roadblock and there was a big sign in front of the roadblock that said, "Flooded Area, Keep Out". So I looked out past the sign and sure enough there was water as far as the eye could see and seeing as to how it was in the spring of the year there were large chunks of ice floating in the water. Well it was about three or four o'clock in the morning by this time and if I couldn't go down this road I was on then I was a long way out of my way, so I did something that was pretty boneheaded: I decided I was going to try and make it across. Well when I got in far enough that the water was coming in the under the door I looked out the windshield and there was still water (and chunks of ice) as far as the eye could see. So that course of action seemed less favorable than it had just a few minutes earlier and I decided I had to get back out of there, so I turned to look out the back window and, well, all I could see was water. My next instinct was to open the car door to get a better look but fortunately the force of the water against the car door kept me from opening it. So then I decided that I had driven straight into this mess, so I should be able to drive straight back out. That got me out all right and after I got out I got a small bucket out of the back seat and started bailing out the car, which was a little damp by that time. As I did this a couple of guys drove up and I talked to them for a bit. They told me that the water was over forty feet deep in there in places. This incident ranks right up there with the stupidest things I've ever done and I likely used up another of my nine lives there.

As it turned out though my boss had made a mistake and instead of being on the road to Cornwall that night I should have been on the road to Burlington in southern Ontario. And as it happened there were whiteouts on the road near Barry that night and because of the whiteouts there was a very serious accident. If my memory serves me correctly, a bus hit some cars and then a transport truck carrying lumber hit the bus. The lumber spilled over everything and then the whole mess caught on fire. Eleven people died in the accident and it became the worst accident in Ontario history at that time.

According to the time I had left Sudbury I would have been in that area at the time the accident happened if I had been traveling in the right direction towards Burlington. I was some hopping mad when I found out my boss had made a mistake when he sent me to Cornwall instead of Burlington but it could be that he saved my life. Another of those nine lives, I guess.

I did one farmer's tax return who lived south of Hamilton and this chap also worked at the railroad car manufacturer where just a few months previously I had also worked. I didn't let on that I had worked there as well since I didn't want him to know that his "tax accountant" had such lowly beginnings. He told me how dangerous it was in there and I agreed with him.

He was an Italian fellow and after I had completed his tax return he offered me a glass of his homemade wine. Trouble was the wine was full of dead fruit flies. He explained to me that they lived in the corks of the wine bottles and before we could drink the wine we had to use our fingers to pick out all these dead fruit flies and in the beginning I was quite fastidious about doing this and was feeling a wee bit squeamish about having these dead flies in my wine. But about the third glass of wine, it was down the hatch and damn the fruit flies. I didn't even bother looking for them let alone picking them out. The farmer looked at me a bit odd and never offered me another glass after that. It was darned good wine though.

There were some innocuous hi-jinks in the factories here and there. I recall one incident where three fellows threw a bag over the foreman's head and then proceeded to lay a beating on him. I don't know what the foreman had done to merit such treatment. He was my foreman for a while and I don't recall that he did me any wrong although I noticed that he did not exactly have a sparkling personality.

In some of these factories the foremen used to wear shopcoats and especially in the warmer weather they would frequently leave these shopcoats in their office unattended. I recall one incident where someone put some feces in the pocket of the foreman's shopcoat. That particular foreman was in my recollection also a little bit personality challenged.

One incident that I always liked involved a chap who had the reputation of being a great drinker. He worked on a job with another fellow and in the course of doing the job this fellow had to frequently lay down on a dolly and go under the apparatus they were building and hold some bolts up through the apparatus so that his partner could put some nuts on the bolts and tighten them up. And one time this chap laid down on the dolly and fell sound asleep sort of half under the apparatus and half right out there on the factory floor. He was quite a sight with his head hanging off the end of the dolly onto the factory floor and snoring with his mouth wide open.

Now what made this event even more hilarious, at least to me, was that the factory was full of fruit flies since many of the men brought bananas and other fruits into work with them, and the discarded peels and cores were an ideal breeding ground for the fruit flies. And I guess this fellow who was asleep on the dolly had been out on a bender the night before because there was a large cloud of fruit flies flying around his open mouth as he snored. Of course these fruit flies were crawling around inside his mouth as well. I don't know how long his partner let him sleep there. I never did hear that this chap got into any trouble over this incident but I still chuckle over that cloud of fruit flies flying around his open mouth every time I think of it.

There was some drinking in the plant and also a bunch of ten or so guys who had to go out every day at lunchtime to their cars to have a few drinks. I always remember one time the foreman caught a chap drinking vodka in the plant and confiscated the bottle. Somehow the Union Steward got involved, so the Steward saw the bottle of vodka. Later the foreman left the vodka in his office and somebody stole it. Well then the foreman called the Steward back and in the course of their conversation said to the Steward, "You saw the vodka." to which steward replied, "No, I saw a bottle with a colourless liquid in it." And that was pretty much the end of that as there was no further proof.

Another high spot I suppose was the time I had a serial killer as a partner. I worked at J.I. Case in Hamilton for something approaching three years mostly as a welder but for about six months I worked on the paintline and for about two or three months out of that six months, I had a partner who became a serial killer. Someone wrote a book about him called, "Poison, From Steeltown to the Punjab, The True Story of a Serial Killer". It is said that he killed six people. They think but are not sure that he killed his brother before he left India for Canada. In Canada he poisoned his wife and killed her. He then went back to India to marry another woman and after he married her he went on a trip in India. While on this trip he met a woman he liked better than the one he had just married, so he married her too and then returned to his other bride and poisoned her. By this time she had had twins by him, so for good measure he killed the twins as well. He then returned to Canada where he was a part owner of a business and he and his partner had life insurance policies on each other, so that there was money to help run the business if one of them died. So he poisoned and killed his business partner as well and this proved to be his undoing since when the papers crossed the insurance agent's desk and the insurance agent saw the similarities with this chap's first wife's death, he called in the police. He was found guilty of first degree murder which in Canada carries a twenty-five year sentence before the possibility of parole. He died in prison at a fairly young age though, so I guess in some sense he got away with it.

Funny thing was that there were about five of us working in that part of the paintline and I thought this guy was the nicest one of the bunch. I thought I was lucky to have him as my partner. I guess you just never know. He frequently used to ask me over to Hamilton to have a drink with him. I never did go but sometimes I wonder if he wanted to practice on me. I doubt it though. I think I really did get along with the guy pretty well. But it could be another one of my nine lives.

I spent about twenty-five years working in various factories in southern Ontario and only about five years in the mines up north. So I spent five times as long in factories as I did in the mines. Having said that, I would be pretty hard pressed to come up with anywhere near as many stories of my factory days as I have of my mining days. Without too much exaggeration it seems as if every day in the mines was an experience.

As I mentioned I sometimes think that I was like a cat with nine lives. There were a few incidents in my life outside the workplace that also gave me some reason to wonder how I had managed to live as long as I have. I will cover some of these briefly since they may be instructive to some people.

I was at my grandparents' house at Round Lake (Tarzwell). I was only seven or eight years old and I remember one time when I was with a couple of my uncles and a woman whose name I can't remember. They had thrown some tin cans out on the snow and they had a twenty-two caliber pistol and a twenty-two caliber rifle and they were shooting at the tin cans. Now as I said I was only seven or eight years old and being only seven or eight years old I was picking up the empty shell casings off the ground and saving them. Now at one point there was a shell casing on the ground but in order to pick it up I had to bend over with my head directly in front of the muzzle of the rifle as my uncle was aiming it at the tin can. Now I remember eyeballing this situation and wondering what my chances were of getting that shell casing without being shot and then suddenly I took the chance and passed my head in front of the muzzle of the rifle to bend over and pick up the shell casing. My uncle fired over the top of my head and then proceeded to give me a dressing down. I was lucky. I shudder in horror to this day over what the result could have been.

Another time I was driving on a two-lane highway and it was very foggy. I caught up to another chap and felt he could be driving a bit faster, so I pulled out to pass him in the fog. I thought I could see fairly well despite the fog and I even recall that after I had passed this fellow I took my time pulling back to the other side of the road. And just when I finally did go back onto my side of the road a car came out of the fog seemingly from nowhere and passed me in the opposite direction. It was then that I realized that if that car had come along just seconds sooner I wouldn't have had a chance. Think about this. Don't repeat my mistake. Never pass in the fog. Nowadays I wouldn't even pass someone on a four-lane highway in the fog. Let them lead the way and take the risks.

And then there is always the possibility of something totally random. I was driving down a city street (where the speed limit was fifty kilometers per hour) one time without a care in the world when suddenly a car crossed my path at a high rate of speed. This car had missed me by a matter of just a few inches. It turned out that the driver was involved in a police chase and he had driven through a stop sign at a high rate of speed directly into my path since the police were in hot pursuit. Fortunately the police officer stopped at the stop sign before resuming the chase. If things had been different by just a second or two I wouldn't be here to write these words.

And perhaps I should make some mention of the fact that I ran a rooming house for a good many years. This enterprise certainly had its high points like the time I had an enraged and mentally unbalanced tenant shake a gun in my face. A short time later he fired a few rounds from the gun into buildings around town. He ended up spending a bit of time in the hospital getting his medications straightened out.

Another time I broke a guy's leg in a fight. I was living a rather fast life at the time, so I completely forgot about it until years later when he reminded me.

For the most part I had a manager in the building and one time I was standing at the front door talking to my manager, when one of the tenants walked out past us, with a nylon stocking over his head. I thought this was a bit peculiar but didn't think much more of it until the next day when I was told that he had tried at knifepoint to rob the gas station at the corner of the street and had been caught. He ended up spending three years in Kingston for this.

One time I had a very large native fellow managing the building for me and I had rented a room to another smaller native whom I shall name Jack Smith as I don't want to mention his real name. Anyway one time I went up to the building and there was a large hole in the wall near the kitchen, so I said to my manager, "Bill, what happened here?" "Well," he said, "Jack Smith was acting up, so I had to put his head through the wall".

So I did a little bit of cursing and swearing and then told Bill that I had some drywall and paint and such in the basement, so he could use that to repair the hole in the wall. And he did that and I have to say that he did a really excellent job such that one couldn't even tell that there had ever been a hole there. The man was actually quite talented.

Anyway a couple of days later I walked back into the house and there was another hole in the wall right in the same place as before. "Bill," I said, "what happened here?" "Well," he replied, "Jack Smith was acting up again, so I had to put his head through the wall again". After ripping some of my hair out by the roots and cursing and swearing again I once again told Bill to get some drywall and stuff out of the basement to repair the hole which he did. Jack Smith moved out shortly afterwards or that bloody hole probably would have reappeared.

One time I had another chap managing the building and I walked in and he was holding a woman tenant by the arm and she was trying to hit him. Well, I grabbed her other arm and tried to reason with her but she wouldn't stop, so I asked one of the tenants to call the police while the manager and I continued to hold onto this woman's arms. I was worried during this time that when the police showed up she was going to start behaving herself and blame the whole episode on us but when the police showed up she, somewhat unbelievably, started trying to kick the police officer and was hurling some rather choice epithets in his direction. Anyway the police office took one look at all this and he said to my manager and I that we were doing a good job and to just keep holding onto her.

Later the police officer wanted to put this woman in handcuffs, so it ended up that I, the manager, the police officer and one or two other tenants were all trying to hold this woman down so we could get the handcuffs on her and we had one hell of time doing it.

The upshot of this story is that whenever I am watching a TV show like "Charlie's Angels" and one of Charlie's Angels flips a great big perpetrator over onto his stomach and slaps the cuffs on him all in two seconds flat I'm a bit incredulous. I mean the woman in my rooming house wasn't even that big, but she was kind of wiry.

Another time I had a tenant who was trouble and I wanted to get rid of him, so I asked him to move out and we agreed on a suitable day for him to move. Well, the day came and I went to see how he was making out moving but on knocking on his door there was no answer, so I used my pass key to get into his room and he was in there passed out on the bed. And his clothes and whatnot were covered with blood as I guess he had been drinking the night before and had gotten into a fight. Anyway he had somewhat surprisingly found another place to live, so I got him cleaned up as best I could although he still had some blood on him and took him over to the other place and believe it or not they rented a room to this bloody and hung over character. I was only too happy to assist him in completing his move.

Anyway I read about this guy in the paper a couple of days later. He was only in his new room a couple of days when he stabbed some poor chap there in the stomach. Like I said he was trouble and I was only too glad to be rid of him.

I took a woman out for quite a few years. We broke up for reasons that are not important here. She was a wonderful woman and I wish her well. Having said that, one must be careful because there are a lot of hidden whackos out there and I would place this woman's brother-in-law in that category. These people get by in life because they don't spend a lot of time out in society but rather spend their time at home where there is generally a sympathetic wife and perhaps children who understand the whacko's idiosyncrasies. The point I am trying to make is that when you go to visit these people you basically don't know who they are and if you run into a whacko, it is doubly dangerous because you are right in the whacko's house where the whacko has control over the situation and knows where the weapons are, and in the eyes of the law don't forget that a man's house is his castle even if the man is a whacko. And there is some possibility that the whacko may harbour some feelings that you (or I in this case) are not the right person for the girlfriend for whatever reason or maybe no reason at all. And feelings can sometimes run rather high about this type of thing.

Well, I don't want to go on and on about this but this is pretty much the situation I found myself in one time. I suffered some machete wounds as a result and after putting this chap down and taking the damn machete away from him, barely made it to the hospital on time to save my life.

Incidentally I might mention that this is the only time in my life that I ever made up my mind to kill someone if I had to. If he had wanted to continue fighting after I took the machete away from him, I knew I had no time left to fool around with him, so I knew he was going to have to die. He must have figured this out himself because he never approached me after I took the machete away from him. A lot of people would have killed him anyway just for being an idiot, but I guess I am just not a very nasty guy.

I am not in a relationship right now and at my age I have some doubts about whether or not I ever will be again. In theory I don't mind the idea. It's just that I can't see myself investing my time in the pursuit as I did when I was younger. Having said that I have made up my mind that if I were to ever go and meet another woman's relations I would have a talk with her first and tell her that if there were any possibility whatsoever that any of her relations were not playing with a full deck I would leave. I would also tell her that I may or may not have time to inform her of my decision to leave before I actually left and that she may be in the position of having to find her own way home since I would already be gone.

Well, there was one other time I may have had murder on my mind. We were in a hall and for certain reasons, some persons started picking on others among whom was myself. Things got very tense in the hall. I recall that one chap jumped right out through a second story window right through the glass. He landed on a car parked down below and wasn't badly injured. Anyway at one point a chap jumped up and started shouting, "No more. No more" and I and others began a mad rush towards our tormenters. And the main tormenter began screaming at the top of his lungs, "It's over. It's over." with what I recall was a look of terror on his face. At this we aborted our mad rush towards him. I can't say what might have happened if the chap had not been screaming that it was over. Certainly I was part of a mob and while it only lasted a few seconds it pretty much qualified as a riot and when a riot starts it's pretty hard to say where it will end.

In my latter life, I took a notion to become a photographer as I have mentioned before. One time I was in an abandoned industrial plant taking pictures. It was kind of dark and gloomy in there and I was moving around quite a bit to take pictures, sometimes not looking where I was putting my feet since I was more interested in looking at the viewfinder of the camera. In some places there were steel grates in the floor and after I had taken quite a few pictures I noticed that some of these grates were missing, so there was nothing there except a hole. Later I learned that below the missing grates there was a flooded basement. More by luck than design I avoided another death trap.

Anyway I suppose that I have made my point that I am like a cat with nine lives. I suppose I am still around because the fellow up above has some purpose for me down here although I've never been able to figure out what it is.

And now dear reader it is time to take my leave. I hope that you have been entertained and in some small way informed by these pages. Thanks for reading and may God bless you.
