My First Mining Job - Part 3

Thompson back in 1969 was a pretty wild town.  There were two hotels...The Thompson Inn and the Burntwood Inn.  Only the Thompson Inn had a bar, and it didn't matter what day of the week it was, you had to line up outside and wait til someone left before the bouncer would let you enter.  He was a huge guy with a short fuse.  If you crossed him you would almost certainly be thrown out through the main doors, using your head to open them.  I saw him do it to one poor lad.  The Burntwood had no bar but they had a licensed restaurant where we would go once a month or so.  They advertised a 72 ounce steak dinner with all the trimmings.  If you could eat it all you got it for free.  Otherwise you paid $24, which was a huge price for a meal back then.  I know several people who tried but none who got a freebie.

The nearest town to Thompson was The Pas, about 4 hours by road, so once you were in Thompson you stayed in Thompson.  Other than work there was little to do.  Some friends and I once went north about 50 miles to a place called Rat Portage.  It was an Indian reservation in the process of moving to higher ground as Manitoba Hydro built large dams and flooded their hunting and fishing territory.  We drove around for a while and then went back to Thompson.  A few years later there was a road from Thompson to Leaf Rapids, about 100 miles further north.  I worked there briefly in 1974, but that story will have to wait til later.

I mentioned before that I was hired as a labourer at a rate of $2.97/hr.  This was considerably more than I had earned in my previous job as a warehouse worker for $2.09/hr.  The prospect for a raise in the near future loomed large thanks to union negotiations for a new contract.  Additionally, there was the rule that anyone who worked in a higher job classification for 5 straight days would get that rate permanently.  The next higher rate was $3.20/hr, paid to drillers, timbermen and motormen.

The only way to get a job permanently was to bid on it, but due to our level being a new one all the high seniority employees were attracted to it.  This meant that no permanent job on my level could be filled by someone at the bottom of the seniority list, but a temporary replacement while a regular employee was away could result in a rate increase that would be effective regardless of what job one was doing.  That's what happened next.

My first week was spent cleaning ditches with a hand shovel into a 5 ton car.  During my second week the motorman went on vacation, his switchman moved up and I became the temporary switchman.  The switchman job consisted of walking in front of the train (regardless of direction of travel) and warning people to "Watch the train."  The switchman also operated the dump wheel to empty cars, using a whistle to signal the motorman.  I still have my whistle...a shiny metal one and a plastic one as a spare.  It rests in my fishing tackle box in case I get lost on a fishing trip, but I don't think I've blown it since I left Thompson.

My next rate increase came with a newly negotiated contract where my rate went up to $3.65 per hour.  It stayed there for the rest of my 8 or 9 months with INCO as I went through pretty much every job on the level, but none were permanent.  I became a spare driller in the stopes, where I learned how to run a jackleg and stoper.  Most of the time I was rockbolting but occasionally I would be drilling to load and blast.  On one occasion, after drilling our drift round I was sent for powder.  While carrying a box of stick powder across a newly filled section of the stope I slipped on the fill surface.  The case of power flew up in the air and I was certain it was going to explode when it landed.  This was the end I thought.  But nothing happened and I picked everything up and continued on my way back to the workplace.

I spent a lot of time scaling loose rock in the stope.  It was an arm tiring exercise to hold a 10 lb bar over your head and poke at cracks in the rock for hours on end.  There was technique to learn in order to avoid injury.  One of our crew was holding a bar improperly, with the tip between his legs.  When he scaled a piece of loose it fell on the other end and drove the bar downwards towards the miner's crotch, where it nipped the end of his tallywhacker!  He went to the lunchroom to report the injury, and the story I heard was that the shift boss had him take his pants off the view the injury, and just as he was examining it another miner entered the lunchroom and saw the shift boss bending over this guy's privates.  He quickly turned and exited the lunchroom, leaving the shift boss with a problem of how to explain what he was actually doing.

Being tired of working on a level with no permanent job, and already being two thirds of the way up a 1,500 man seniority list I decided to bid on a driller job at Soab.  But I didn't get the job so I decided to leave Thompson and return home to Saskatoon.   Cominco Potash, near Vanscoy was hiring.  I applied for a job underground and was accepted in early May/1971.