ODDS’N’SODS — A lunch fit for a mouse

In the 1930s, the Paymaster Consolidated gold mine near Timmins, Ont., was known as the “ham, jam and an orange mine.”

When the Paymaster restarted in 1933, for the second time, funds were in short supply. As a result, only part of the mill was used, and mill feed was trucked in from the No. 5 and No. 6 shafts, which were more than a mile away.

The bunkhouses and cookhouse were near the mill and shops, and underground miners, in order to get to work, had to walk a mile and a half to the shafts.

None of the miners had automobiles, and the rutted road over which they had to walk was especially difficult to traverse in inclement weather. I happened to have one of the two cars parked at the bunkhouse, but, since I was only a block from the shops where I worked, I didn’t use it much.

All single employees were required to stay in the bunkhouse and eat at the cookery, which also provided the lunch the miners took to work everyday.

Dozens of miners used to walk to work at 4:30 a.m. carrying their lunchboxes, which were filled by the company.

Without deviation, each lunchbox contained two sandwiches of thinly sliced ham, one jam sandwich and an orange. That lunch was little more than a snack to the miners who had to hand muck and tram the mine cars to the grizzly.

Black Mike once asked the cook, who liked to be called “the chef,” if it was he who sliced the ham for the sandwiches. The chef replied in the affirmative, and Mike commented on the thinness of the meat, saying he must have nearly missed the ham when cutting it.

Although the miners often complained about the sub-standard bunkhouses and plain food served at the cookhouse, they also knew that the hundreds of men who rustled the mines for work would be happy with their jobs.

Since most of the miners were of Hungarian descent, goulash was served every other day. I never did develop much of a taste for Hungarian food. We in the shops had it much better (we started work at 8 a.m.), and I can still envision the great mounds of fried eggs warming in the oven. Some of those eggs, however, were left over from the first breakfast, at 4 a.m., so I never developed a taste for them either.

I was married in 1936, and to this day I appreciate my wife’s cooking.

— The author, a frequent contributor to this column, resides in Boyertown, Pa.