Lamps still burning bright

Pauline Ring (ne Morisette) was seven when she learned that her father, Jean-Paul, was involved in a mining accident at the Teck-Hughes gold mine near Kirkland Lake, Ont.

That day, Aug. 28, 1957, she waited anxiously at home with her mother and seven siblings for news from the mine. “I remember people coming in to the house and everyone being upset, but I didn’t know what was happening,” she recalls.

Earlier that morning, Jean-Paul Morissette, an experienced miner, and his shift boss, Maxwell Parker, were caught in an underground rockslide that carried them down the shaft. When they were found, all but Morissette’s hand was covered with rubble, yet he could still be heard through the dense rock. Parker, meanwhile, was waist-deep in rock, timber and dirt. Efforts to free them were complicated by the weight of a 4-ton rock, which had the men pinned down.

At about 9:30 p.m. the rock was finally removed, but, sadly, Morrissette died on his way to the surface. Parker died two weeks later of complications resulting from the accident.

A new book, Lamps Forever Lit: A Memorial to Kirkland Lake Area Miners, by Bernie Jaworsky, chronicles the deaths of 310 miners in the area, including Morisette and Parker. The stories date back as far as the late 1800s and as recently as a few years ago.

The book took four years to research, compile and write — not an easy task for a retired science teacher who didn’t know how to type, let alone use a computer.

“I didn’t do much else the last four years,” says the mild-mannered Jaworsky. “This is my first book and probably my last.” His wife Tanya describes the book as a labour of love. “Although it was hard work and, at times, a lot of drudgery, he was driven to do it,” she says. “He wanted to do this for the families.”

Jaworsky arrived in Kirkland Lake in 1967 to teach science at the town’s only high school. Throughout the years, he taught many students, including Ring, but it was a trip to the town’s Miners’ Memorial in the early 1990s that inspired him to write about lost miners.

“I looked at the inscriptions on the monument and I started getting interested in the names,” recalls Jaworsky, who taught six of the men whose names are engraved in the memorial. “I didn’t realize that that many miners were killed.”

As the book began to take shape, Jaworsky wrote letters to prospective publishing companies. However, only Cambria Publishing, a small, Calgary-based publisher headed by Lawrence Chrismas, a geologist and photographer, replied. Cambria had already published two award-winning mining-related books, Alberta Miners: A Tribute and Coaldust Grins: Portraits of Canadian Coal Miners and was interested in what Jaworsky was doing. There was just one problem: Jaworski still needed about $40,000 to get a high-quality hardcover version published.

In a groundswell of community support, locals rallied around the book and succeeded in raising about $20,000. The rest was donated by the United Steel Workers of America.

The book is a straightforward account of the deaths of the miners, and Jaworsky handles the delicate subject with grace. “Death in a mine is not gentle,” he says in his introduction, and though some of the accounts make for sombre reading, the writing is simple and honest, never heavy-handed.

Numerous black-and-white photos fill the pages, putting faces to the names of those lost. The picture of the Morisette family came from a tattered scrapbook put together by Ring’s mother, Lucienne Morisette, after the death of her husband.

“He was always an important figure in our lives even though he wasn’t alive,” recalls Ring, now 50. For her, Lamps Forever Lit is a lasting tribute to the men who risked their lives in the mines.

To order a copy, contact Cambria Publishing at (403) 270-3547.