Hemlo Days

I was lucky enough to work at Hemlo during the early development days when shafts and ramps were advancing on three properties at the same time.  Every tramp miner in Canada passed through there looking for work.  Hiring for an entire mine is a co-operative affair driven by HR and shared by all departments.  At Williams we had a procedure of three interviews with a candidate and as a general foreman at one of the mines I had responsibility for reviewing resumes and picking out the ones destined for interview.  Every day was different.  You never knew what you would find in the resume pile.  One miner called himself a "scooptramp" operator.  (A scooptram is a low profile front end loader used underground.)  No doubt he was, as he left no address or phone number!  Another miner taped some coins to his resume and invited me, the reader to buy a coffee to drink while I read the resume.

Good miners were never easy to find, despite the large pile of resumes.  Other camps were quite active, and housing remained limited for miners to bring their families.  Most of the development work was done by contractors who lived in large camps onsite.  Production mining was similar to most modern mines, and many of the early miners came from Leaf Rapids, in Manitoba.  They were mainly Newfoundlanders who welcomed the chance to move at least half way back to their homes in Nfld.  These were solid dependable family men with great work ethic and superb skills.  Everything a mine could ask for when starting a new mine.  Another group came from Sudbury, where strikes and low nickel prices created a surplus of well trained miners for the new mines coming on stream.  A lot of them had family trouble adjusting to a small isolated town like Marathon after living their entire lives in Sudbury. 

One of my favourite hires came early on when we decided we needed a mine clerk to manage all the paper flow along with dry assignments.  Morley Crabb was the man we wanted, all 5 foot 4 inches of him.  He was a mid '50's former cagetender with a past that included heavy drinking and significant heart problems.  But he was amazingly efficient with the paper and the most cheerful guy you would ever meet.  There was only one problem...we were instructed by HR that they would come up with three candidates for the position, interview them all and select the best one.  To get our man we came up with a list of requirements that only Morley could fill and submitted it to HR, along with Morley's application.  HR were not impressed.  They saw through our ruse but they couldn't come up with any more candidates, so Morley got the job.  He was a great addition to the team as we slowly brought our manpower complement up to speed, but about four years later he died suddenly of a heart attack.  He's buried in the Marathon cemetery and someday I plan to stop by and say hello to the best mine clerk a mine could possibly have.

Update: In 2019 we travelled through Ontario on our way to New Brunswick to visit friends.  We stopped in Marathon and I was able to find Morley's grave.