As a greenhorn laborer, I’d be doing anything for anybody at anytime, anywhere, and under any conditions and sometimes the worst conditions—jobs nobody else wanted, that were dangerous and didn’t pay all that much. And by the way (I was told), don’t be asking any questions about it.
If I turned out to be a decent worker, I’d move up and begin earning respect. Good laborers had a reputation for staying out of the way, keeping quiet and never costing anyone anything or hurting anyone through their inexperience and ignorance.
Most new laborers spent a lot of time loading and unloading supplies from the cage that, after dropping off a shift of workers, immediately became a cargo carrier. Laborers would stack the materiel in the station area and then load whatever it was that was needed back in the mine onto a motor (more or less a small locomotive) that came to the station. So it was that Frankie immediately assigned me to start unloading supplies as they were delivered from the surface.
It was, as I’d anticipated, very heavy work.
This mine used a lot of timber, which I’ll get into later. The worst of it was the very unwieldy and incredibly heavy twelve-by-twelve inch twelve foot posts that we needed two men to lift and stack. My being inexperienced at stacking huge timber resulted in several collapsing piles. More than once I was thankful for the steel-toed boots.
There were stacks of rock bolts that I later found to be kind of enjoyable to install but not much fun to unload and stack by the thousands. In short everything that was used in a mine came down by way of the main shaft, and it was the laborers who saw it all first.
Rarely in our mine did anyone ever work alone. That was a safety precaution, and it worked. On occasion one partner would sustain an injury and the other would go for help. Without the partner the injured worker could lie there for hours before either a shift boss came by or he was noticed missing at lunch or at the end of the day. It was very rare that I ever did much alone during my time at Section 35.
Frankie paired me up with a young guy by the name of Grimm. I can’t recall his first name, but he was relatively new, having been at the mine for just a few weeks. Learning that Grimm had been working at the station that long was a little depressing, as I thought that would be my future too. But as it turned out, there was something else keeping Grimm at the station, and whatever it was I never found out about. It couldn’t have been his work, because from what I saw he worked hard and did everything that needed to be done.
Frankie was seldom to be seen that first day, and in fact, after he had given me his speech and told me what to do, he had vanished. I think he was much more interested in visiting the miners he was supervising than a couple of greenhorns stacking lumber.
About four in the afternoon, people from all over the 1–5 level came straggling back to the station, reporting whatever progress they had made that day to the shift boss, then riding the cage up to the surface. Once again Grimm and I, as the newest men, didn’t want to be first into the lunchroom or first on the cage, so we took our time and, when it seemed reasonable, went into the lunchroom to check out.
Still no sign of Frankie, so I thought we should wait for him, but Grimm thought we should head to the surface. If Frankie wanted us, he knew where we were. So, moving our tags from the out board to the in board, we headed for the cage and the surface. I was dog tired, my shirt was falling apart, and my hands were raw, but I’d made it through the day.
Those first few days were exhausting. I had the wrong clothes, of course. My flannel shirt, in addition to becoming soaked with sweat, couldn’t take the work and ripped right away, first at the elbows and then just about everywhere else. Cool air rushes down the main shaft to the station, and with my soaked shirt on, I was more or less cold all day long.
Everything was just so heavy, and it didn’t help that I had forgotten my gloves. My hands immediately began blistering, and aching constantly made for an initially trying existence.
By working at the station, I soon learned the unique mining names given to some of the more common items that we were unloading. Jackhammers were chippers, shovels were muck sticks, rock drills were machines, and sledgehammers were double jacks. I don’t know why, but a pick ax stayed a pick ax. With rock bolts it depended on what they were to be used for. A bolt used to help stabilize rock overhead in the back was called a roof bolt, but it could also be a rib bolt or a block bolt.
A jack similar to an automobile jack but considerably larger and used by miners as a temporary means of ground support was called a roof jack. Those two instances were the only times I heard the back referred to by the word roof underground. Why they weren’t called back bolts and back jacks I never knew.
Sometimes a laborer’s first job at the station would go on for days or weeks, depending on the needs of the boss, the laborer’s ability to work, and the boss’s opinion of him. I knew if I did well, I would eventually be allowed to accompany the motors back to the working areas of the mine. I would then unload the supplies and accompany the motor back to the station to load more supplies, riding comfortably in an empty ore car all the way. As it turned out, my working exclusively in the station area lasted only for about a week before I was needed elsewhere.
At the beginning of my second week, Frankie let me know I’d have to ride the motors along with the supplies I’d loaded back to the work areas, where I would then unload and deliver them to the miners. In my mind and from what I’d seen up until then, an assignment like this meant I was making progress, because now I’d come into contact with miners’ helpers and every now and again an actual miner. It was lucky for me because after a long first week, I was already sick of being stuck at the station all day long.
Underground trains, cars and locomotive combined, were simply referred to as motors and the drivers called motormen. They looked like something between an amusement park train and a miniature freight train. They were fairly low profile and ran on narrow-gauge track. Attached to the locomotive were any number of ore cars capable of holding at least a ton of ore each.
Because there was no place for the train to turn around, the cars always went into the mine first, followed by the motor. What made running one of these trains difficult was that half the time the motorman couldn’t see where he was going. The poor visibility made it extremely difficult for the motorman to see people or debris on the track ahead of the cars.
Debris was a constant hazard, mostly due to falling rock, but sometimes from supplies left on the track by inexperienced laborers. As a result, derailed cars were a problem but something a good motorman could quickly remedy.
You might think that a motor with ten or more ore cars attached would make a lot of noise rolling down the track and would be easily heard. That wasn’t the case, though. With all the other ambient noise in a mine, a rolling motor was just peripheral sound that could easily be missed. Lights were therefore used in safety systems designed to keep workers from being run over by motors.
As a motor travels in reverse out of the station and into the mine through tunnels, called drifts, the motorman would come upon a series of lanyards hanging from the back at various intervals. Each time the motor passed under a lanyard, he was supposed pull it, setting off a series of lights flashing along the drift ahead warning anyone on the track that a motor was coming and to move quickly out of the way. Not a bad idea, but the flaws in that system were that bulbs did burn out and did not get replaced, and motormen in a hurry sometimes failed to pull the warning light lanyards.