ODDS’N’SODS — The improvising miner

People connected with open-pit mining are familiar with the Bucyrus-Erie Corporation (B-E) as the builders of the world’s largest shovels and draglines.

In the 1930s, B-E manufactured a line of low-weight, all-welded shovels, and the company’s 10-B model became the most popular cable-operated backhoe ever produced. Casswell Construction of Kirkland Lake purchased several of those backhoes and, as a result, got the jump on competitors.

Casswell’s area superintendent for the Porcupine camp was “Slim” Pusey, with whom I sometimes worked at New Ontario Machine Works. Slim was known as a hard worker and had a lot of adventures.

One summer evening, Slim appeared while I was working at Pamour. He was to move the backhoe to the Hoyle mine, 2 miles east, with the help of a loaded dump truck. The driver was late, however, and once Slim loaded the backhoe on to the trailer, he had nothing to do but wait.

After making a few futile phone calls and cussing about the driver, Slim hitched the trailer to his pickup in an attempt to move the machine himself.

The truck only spun its wheels, however. Slim was fuming.

Needing weight in the back of the truck, he headed for a softball game at the Pamour dormitory, and returned with several miners.

Even with the extra weight the miners provided, the 10-B still would not budge. Several miners then obtained 8-ft. lengths of lagging and, by prying the rear of the trailer, finally got it moving. Slim was finally headed for Hoyle, though his momentum was short-lived. After he lost traction on the road to the mine, he unhooked the trailer and drove his benefactors back to Pamour.

On his return, he unloaded the backhoe, drove his pickup on to the trailer, which he then connected to the 10-B, and crawled to the mine gate. The security guard there, a newly arrived Englishman, seemed perplexed by the display. “I say, old chap, isn’t that arrangement a bit unusual?,” he asked Slim.

On Slim’s return to Pamour, he returned the lagging and announced that he was through for the day. He mentioned, however, that he was going to check the beer parlor in Golden City for the missing driver. “If that truck driver is in there,” he said to me, “all hell will break loose.”

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

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