The Deep Dark (7 page)

One immediately peeled off his clothes and started running around, laughing and having the time of his life. The younger kid thought that it looked like fun, too. In a split second there were two kids laughing in the shower, which was fine, except for one thing.

The smaller of the two was a girl.

Men around the shower towers grabbed washcloths and frantically tried to cover up. All those months of men wearing nothing but shower shoes playing grab-ass flashed through the mind of the man who'd made the offer.
Who knew that tot was a girl? And she's been running around here?

Wilkinson's best buddy, Johnny Davis, was among the men in the dry getting ready to go underground on May 2, his twenty-eighth birthday. Davis was local through and through. He'd graduated from Mullan High School, enlisted in the Army, and, like so many of his classmates, returned to the district and the mines. He'd started as a weekend smelter helper at Bunker Hill and had done a small stint for Hecla mines before coming to Sunshine in November 1967.

Wilkinson tried to cajole his pal into skipping work. If Davis said yes, Wilkinson was sure Flory would probably give in, too.

“You ought to dump shift. Let's go get drunk,” Wilkinson persisted. “It's your birthday, man.”

Davis was tempted, and it seemed that he was going to say yes from under his thick mustache, but ultimately family obligations won out. He was married and had a kid of his own and two stepchildren.

“Nah,” he said, “can't do it.”

Wilkinson was only mildly disappointed. He'd figured they'd catch up for a few beers after shift.

W
HATEVER MEN OF THE DISTRICT TOLD OUTSIDERS WAS THEIR
reason for going mining, Ron Flory's reasons were twofold. Yeah, the money was good, but he loved it even more because between the cage rides up and down, every day underground was different. Every day he felt privileged to work in a world that few ever see. The underground was a mystery to topsiders. They saw it as a dark, dank, unpleasant world of rock faces and brutal sameness. Those who didn't know metal mining, or who didn't respect where the silver came from for their camera film or for the conductive strands of metal that fired the circuitry on their cars or TVs, talked trash about the underground.
Cold as stone. Rocks in your head. Dumb as a rock. Where the sun don't shine.
The miners, many believed, were a born-to-lose, scruffy rabble who toiled with a pick and a shovel because they weren't smart enough to do anything better where the sun
did
shine. Good gyppo miners knew better. And those who couldn't gyppo and plugged away as pipe men or water guys looked at gyppos with deserved respect and even awe. Men like Flory saw great challenges in working a stope, shooting a face down just so. Meeting the unknown head-on was one of the rewards of mining. Understanding what the rock was saying when it talked was more relevant than speaking three languages and knowing what wine went with steak. Flory knew which formations meant good money and, conversely, what clues signaled a difficult and ultimately less profitable stope. Besides mere muscle, it took skill and fearlessness to get a round drilled and blasted, muck pulled, and the stope bolted, and then to do it all again.

No one knew it, of course, but on May 2 a man needed more than strength and daring. Ron Flory, his partner Tom Wilkinson, and 171 others were on their way to discovering just what it took to be a Sunshine miner, the Marines of the underground.

S
INCE
K
ELLOGG AND
W
ALLACE WERE SO INSULA
R
—
CULTURALLY,
geographically
,
and economically—most boys simply grew up knowing that mines waited on the other side of adolescence. Mines weren't traps, but they were whirlpools of sorts. Close to the edge, with a father or an uncle going mining, a young man found himself leaning over, curious. Before long, he was inside. It was like that for Ron Flory. His family had shuttled between Montana, Washington, New Mexico, and Idaho as his dad, Richard, worked the tramp miner's circuit. Home, however, was always Pine Creek in the Coeur D'Alenes. A Nazarene churchgoing woman of tested resilience, Belle Flory had raised five children on her husband's wildly fluctuating paychecks. The Florys never had a TV, though they always had electricity—when many neighbors and friends didn't. Whenever the mines went on strike, Richard Flory waited it out while his wife stretched macaroni until it snapped. It was a hard way to live, so when she finally booted him out, few were surprised. Belle Flory didn't leave the district. She couldn't. None of her family could leave. Ron Flory's brother, Bob, had long wanted to move away, but he also found himself working at Sunshine. The district, he began to believe, was like one of those open crab barrels he'd seen one time on Seattle's waterfront. The containers didn't have lids because they didn't need any. If a crab tried to escape, the others would grab it and pull it back.

Ron Flory had his dumb-kid brushes with the law and two years of Army service behind him when he came home to a miner's life. His father broke him in at Nancy Lee, a Kellogg-owned lead and silver producer near Superior, Montana. The idea that he could do something else for a living never really entered Flory's mind. Mining was a dirty, thankless job that someone had to do, and he didn't mind. The only thing that got to him was the never-ending nighttime. It was dark in the morning before shift, the work was in the dark, and after shift it was dark outside. He was a mole. Sometimes the only way around it was to dump shift during the week.

Partner Tom Wilkinson went mining later. He'd tried working at Bunker Hill, where his dad had spent most of his career, but poor eyesight kept him topside. Surface jobs were all right, but they didn't reap the kind of paycheck he wanted—not when he saw the other kids he'd grown up with trading in cars whenever the mood suited them. Wilkinson had seen his father try other jobs, but the old man had always kept coming back to the mines. With each injury, with each downturn or strike, there was always the possibility that the subterranean pull would weaken. The worst of it came when a timber fell on his dad and broke or seriously ruptured several discs. The old man went back, but it was a struggle. He ended his career topside at Bunker Hill. At five feet six and 135 pounds, Wilkinson wasn't a big man, nor was he a particularly smooth talker. He was a tad rough around the edges and probably knew how to party better than anyone else in Smelterville. He'd dropped out of school, had been raised in part by his grandmother, and had even done some time in a boys' reform school in St. Anthony, Idaho. Frances Christmann, the daughter of a veteran miner, didn't care about any of that. If Wilkinson was a bad boy with eight tattoos and a cuss-filled mouth, there was something gentle about him, too. She was woman enough to see it. They dated for a couple of years and married on May 20, 1956. In time they had a daughter, Eileen, and a son, Tommy.

Wilkinson worked five tedious years smoothing the running grain of centuries-old Douglas fir on a planing machine at a Smelterville mill. Making housing-grade lumber was repetitive, and the income from the job predictably flat. Wilkinson rustled a job at Sunshine in 1970, joining two of his brothers already there. Six months later, he and his old school buddy Flory were partners.

7:10
A.M.,
M
AY
2

Coeur D'Alene Mining District

V
ISITORS TENDED TO FUSE TOGETHER
K
ELLOGG AND
W
ALLACE AS
rough-and-tumble, hardscrabble, and indistinguishable. But in reality, while the neighboring towns shared origins and economics, they were more rivals than twins. Kellogg was a company town that sprang from the silvery profits and spillover goodwill of the Bunker Hill Mining Company. The lead, zinc, and silver producer was best known for its lead smelter, with its towering stacks spewing smoke, and its strings of lights that made the place look almost Christmas-like at night. Locals referred to the company as “Uncle Bunk.” With a long tradition of local ownership and philanthropy—founding the YMCA, building swimming pools, and funding youth groups—Bunker Hill was the community's largest employer and most generous benefactor. Uncle Bunk almost always did right by his men. Even after the Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation acquired it, residents still clung to the belief that Uncle Bunk would always look out for them. If a miner—or an office worker, for that matter—worked hard, there'd always be a job and food on the table. But with the shift from local ownership to outsiders, the 3,500 citizens of Kellogg began to understand that unbending loyalty was foolhardy.

The stand-ins for Bunker Hill's absentee management were often too fancy for local tastes. They weren't interested in being a part of the Coeur d'Alene Mining District's insular world. Most executives' wives shopped in Spokane. Kellogg, most certainly, didn't have what the well-heeled desired. Even worse was the unspoken understanding that time in Kellogg was merely a stop on a career path. Outsider managers from Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York City were always temporary, with roots planted back home.

A masonry and terra-cotta village that had barely changed architecturally from its 1880s origins, Wallace was fortunate to be the hometown of several mining corporations—Hecla and Day Mines being the preeminent ones. As such, Wallace, with its population of 2,200, wasn't as dependent on the corporate types who came to scavenge at Kellogg. Wallace's companies actually
lived
in, and mixed with, the community. In a Wallace bar like the 1313 Club, it wouldn't be unusual to have two men in a heated argument over mining or even politics—the only thing remarkable would be that one man was a miner and the other a CEO.

Those who live in them know that rivalries drive small towns. When boys morph into men, home territory becomes sacred. In the mining district, the battle over which sports teams were better
—
which town was bette
r—
sometimes turned intense. Parking-lot posturing frequently led to black eyes and petty vandalism, sometimes worse. One time a pack of boys wearing Kellogg Wildcats letter jackets took a baseball bat to the windows of a Wallace High School bus, leaving a row of jagged holes and a parking lot that glittered like a Vegas showgirl. The rivals were pretty evenly split in athletic prowess, allowing both towns to claim bragging rights. Most of the time, the Wallace Miners were the football team to beat, while the Wildcats had the upper hand in basketball.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Wallace billed itself as “the richest little city in the world.” Kellogg would never dare such a Chamber of Commerce slogan. In fact, strangers knew Kellogg as the dirtiest town in America.

C
AREER
S
UNSHINE MINER
C
HARLIE
C
LAPP KNEW THAT HIS ROWDY
son, Dennis, was a schoolyard fight away from a trip to St. Anthony's, and he wasn't about to let that happen. He moved his family from Wallace to Moon Gulch, seven miles from Kellogg. Dennis couldn't have been more pissed off, or more dejected. Though only in sixth grade, he was a Wallace kid to his bones. Kellogg reeked. Heavy, leaden smoke ensnared the town. Not only did Uncle Bunk's lead smelter put a gray lid over everything, but it encroached on every aspect of life—even those most sacred sports fields. The grounds staff made a valiant effort to keep the high school football field Foster Grant green, but to no avail. The smelter claimed the turf. The Kellogg track team had to huff and puff through smoke at home, and frequently did better on road trips outside the kill zone. Rivals hated playing on the Kellogg field of cocoa-powder dirt. Yet, for longtime residents, there was beauty in the discharge from the enormous smokestacks. It was a symbol of prosperity. Coming from poorer towns made it easier for most to shrug off the stink, or blink away the stinging air.

Football saved Dennis Clapp's childhood. At the time in a boy's life when nothing matters more, the Wildcats were the better district football team. Miners' sons battled on the barren Kellogg gridiron, dusting off and putting an end to disagreements their fathers had a mile underground. When Clapp graduated in 1967, he was a member of one of the biggest classes in Kellogg High history, with 299 classmates. And like many of his pals, Clapp took a temporary job at Sunshine while he contemplated what he'd do with his life. When summer ended, he just stayed put.
And why not?
He had cash in his pocket, and a cherry '57 Chevy that he buffed to a mirror shine. By working underground, guys like Dennis Clapp had the opportunity to make serious cash.

M
INERS CHAFED A HEAVY BACK-AND-FORTH LINE BETWEEN THE
mines in Butte, Montana, and those strung through the Coeur d'Alene Mining District. In hard times, when certain metal prices dipped low, companies cut back on crews and sent men packing for other, more viable operations. Labor disputes also sent miners from one place to another. Even so, men on both sides of the state line were fiercely loyal to their roots and to the guys who came from home. Coeur d'Alene men always thought they were better miners than those fellows from Butte. In Kellogg and Wallace, working three days in a row was known as a “Butte ringer,” as in “I got my Butte ringer in.” District men figured Montana miners took off Fridays to get an early start on the weekend and missed Mondays because they were too hungover to make it to work. Montana miners made similar jibes at Idaho miners.

In the late 1950s some Butte mines faltered, while most of Idaho's held steady. Kenny “Ace” Riley, eighteen at the time, couldn't rustle a job where his father mined. When a referral came from his brother-in-law, already at Sunshine, Riley, a reed of a young man at only 135 pounds, fibbed about his weight on his job application and was hired as a miner's helper.

Before he left town, his dad offered a warning.