A Room for the Summer: Adventure, Misadventure, and Seduction in the Mines of the Coeur D'Alene

by Fritz Wolff

Overview

While sitting at the controls of the largest underground hoist, you hold the lives of two hundred men in your hands. You are five thousand feet underground when your headlamp suddenly burns out, leaving you in total darkness. After blowing up a chunk of Precambrian quartzite two billion years old, you experience the privilege of standing on a piece of earth where no human has stood before.

In A Room for the Summer, Fritz Wolff takes the reader on a memorable journey into the rough-and-tumble world of hardrock mining, recounting his experiences both above and below ground as an apprentice mining engineer during the late 1950s.

In June 1956, at the age of eighteen, Wolff went to work for the Bunker Hill mine in Kellogg, Idaho, in the Coeur d'Alene region. Arriving in a tired 1939 Chevy coupe, with about twenty dollars in his pocket, Wolff spent three college summers working for the company. He learned firsthand the pleasures of camaraderie with fellow workers and the dangers of working underground. He also encountered some unforgettable characters: his mining partner Chris, as skilled a journeyman as ever lit a fuse; Sanitary Pete, who wore bedroom slippers in the shower; and Dora, the boarding-house cook who served up thirty dozen eggs before noon every day for twenty years. And then there was Carol, who with surprising politeness drew a young and inexperienced Wolff into a "commercial embrace."

Mining in the West reached a critical peak in the late 1950s-when prosperity seemed assured and work was readily available. Visa and Mastercard had yet to be invented, and two dollars and fifty cents an hour was enough to support a family. Miners-along with loggers, railroaders, and others-literally shaped the nation.

Today the hardrock mining industry is all but forgotten. The Bunker Hill mine is known, not because it produced 430 million ounces of silver and not because it provided a living for thousands of families for more than a century, but because it is one of the largest EPA superfund sites. Wolff does not idealize the mining industry; for many workers the conditions were nightmarish. But in spare, lyrical prose, he evokes the intrinsic goodness of a simpler time, when hard-working folks went about their business with courage, humor, and lots of gumption.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806136585
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	04/04/2005
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Fritz Wolff spent ten years in the mining business and twenty-three years in aerospace management. Since his retirement, he has worked as principal investigator for the Washington State Geologic Survey, collecting data on inactive and abandoned mines. He resides in Olympia, Washington.

Table of Contents

	Preface	xi
	Acknowledgments	xvii
1	Lux Rooms	3
2	$2.37	20
3	Oakie Stope	37
4	Up	52
5	Old Bill Bradley	56
6	The Bunker Hill Mine	61
7	Sanitary Pete	67
8	A Tea	71
9	Darkness	79
10	Dora Tatham	85
11	A Thing Called a Picaroon	89
12	Lunch	92
13	"My Name Is Judy"	97
14	Nicknames	103
15	Doris and Wallace	106
16	Jackleg	114
17	Always Faithful	119
18	The Hoistmen	133
19	Two Miles to Riches or Bankruptcy	149
20	Timber Repair	165
21	Misfire	171
22	Terrible Edith	178
23	Cocktails	205
24	A Fight	219
25	Shorty	224
26	Joe Gordon	228
27	$2.50	232
28	More Money, Less Fun	244
	Epilogue	249
	Notes	263