EDITORIAL & OPINION — ODDS ‘N’ SODS — Paternal spring

In the spring of my first year at Central Manitoba Mines, in 1925, I took my eldest boy, Hod, out of school and into the gold camp with me. He was overgrown for his age, not yet 16, and I thought a period in the bush would do him good.

After a while, I got him a job as an electrician’s helper at a low rate of pay. Later, the mine captain, who was known as Little Mac, offered him another job at a small shaft at higher pay. I thought he would be shovelling rock on the rock pile, and said OK.

When I went down to look the place over, I was horrified to see him operating a tugger hoist and bringing up a bucket of muck. When he got it safely landed, I closed the air line and told him to get Little Mac. When he showed up, I lit into him hard. No boy of that age was permitted to hoist over men, and I would have been in a fine mess if an accident had happened. When the storm blew over, I sent Hod back as the electrician’s helper. Now that he holds down an important job at Noranda, I like to chip him about the time I fired him from his first mining job. He, in return, digs at my accident prevention work. He has me there.

Also that spring, he and I, with plenty of help from the mine gang, were building a 3-room cottage to house my wife and two other sons when they came during the summer holidays.

One night, we were working alone on the roof, which was laid except for a small hole left for a fireplace chimney. We were trying to get the roof paper on as a rainstorm threatened. In my haste, I covered over the hole, meaning to cut it out later. A few minutes later, still in a hurry, I stepped over the hole and down I went. In falling through, I gave the base of my skull a whack. I fell only about 5 ft. before getting caught up in the ceiling joists. That’s all I knew for the next day. Hod got the doctor and some help to get me down. They said I was alert and talking normally the next day, but of that I remember nothing. I was soon up and around again.

When I brought Margie and the boys in from Winnipeg that summer, we took the train to Riverton, a boat across Lake Winnipeg and then paddled in canoes the rest of the way. That trip took us almost four days. The following year, we came in by plane from Lac du Bonnet, which took only an hour.

— The preceding is an excerpt from A Mining Trail: 1902-1945. The author, who retired in 1945, was a manager of the Dome, Sigma and Red Lake mines in Porcupine, Ont.