The Deep Dark (9 page)

Among the very few who never set foot in that bar was Bob Launhardt. He wasn't a complete teetotaler, but close. Even when he was a pipe fitter, and among the lower echelon of the mining hierarchy, he stayed away from Sunshine's favorite watering hole. Had he spent some time there, he might have learned that the Big Creek Store was a training ground for future miners. Boys would sit with colas, listening to miners bitch about their women, brag about their mining prowess, and generally strengthen the bonds that made them more a fraternity than outsiders could ever imagine. By the time a Big Creek kid was ready to go to work, he already had the soul of a Sunshine miner.

I
N THE SPRING OF 1972,
B
IG
C
REEK NATIVE
R
ANDY
P
ETERSON,
twenty-three, had been among a group of laid-off Sunshine workers, part of the company's cycle of managing the ups and downs of the metals market. But by May 2, he'd been called back and was caging with a coppery-headed nineteen-year-old named Roger Findley. Peterson was one of the few who didn't want to mine. The son of a hoistman, Peterson had returned to Big Creek after a brutal tour of duty in Vietnam. And while there were other things the capable young man could do, Sunshine paid $1.25 an hour more than a previous job with the highway department. Even better, working underground meant actually working
less
than six hours a day because travel time from portal to portal was paid, as negotiated by the union. It was just too sweet a deal to pass up.

Even though Peterson and Findley weren't miners, they understood the pride of being one. It went beyond mind-boggling physical strength and relentless stamina. Certainly the hot temperatures of mines like Sunshine and Star were given their due by tramp miners from California and Nevada mines. A lot of those men just couldn't make the grade in northern Idaho mines. To be considered a miner in the Coeur d'Alenes, a man had to know how to drive a drift, run a raise, and work a stope. To be a
real
miner, a man had to drill, blast, muck, timber, bolt, and do it all in a day's work. Sunshine miners scoffed at their supposed counterparts down in Nevada. A man down there did only one thing. He might drill all day. He might load explosives all day. He was a cog in a process that kept him from really getting in there and mining. Being a Sunshine miner was being an all-around miner, and that meant working in most jobs before going mining. Running the cage was another step on the way.

Cagers and hoistmen usually came on shift a half hour before other crews showed up. First, in accordance with state and federal law, they'd test the cage by running the conveyance up and down the shaft. The first men down ahead of the working men—foremen, supervisors, and shifters—made up what was known in the district as the “meat run.” Running the cage, or “caging,” was nothing more than an elevator operator's job. Even so, it commanded a certain amount of respect. The relationship between cage tender and hoistman—one the eyes and ears of the operation, the other the machine-powered muscle—was crucial to any mining operation. Not only did they have to work completely in tandem, separated by thousands of feet of darkly lit shaft with men tethered in cages that hurled from level to level, but the best of them did so with a kind of finesse that recalled the great pitcher-and-catcher pairs of the major leagues. A good hoistman could read his cage tender's bell signals and know what kind of mood the fellow was in that day, or if in fact it was him ringing or another guy. Same with the cage tender. He knew by the way the hoist stopped at a level if his buddy was running it way up in the hoist room, or if some other guy had taken over while he went to the shitter. The squawker, a buzzer system, let the hoistman know what level they were at when a ride up or down was needed. The bells chimed when the cage tender wanted the hoistman to know just where they were going. It was all done in a rudimentary code. Sunshine's station signal for traveling to 3700 10-Shaft was three rings of the bell, then a short pause, then four bells, and another pause before adding one more ring for
up
and two more for
down.
The electric stroke bells on the main station of the Jewell were enormous and cast from brass. One hit 87 decibels and the other 93. No one doubted the hoistman who said he could hear the bells ringing in his sleep.

With lunch ten minutes away, Randy Peterson and Roger Findley listened politely as shaft foreman Fred “Gene” Johnson showed them how to do things
his
way with some timbers and fan lines before announcing that he had to head out to the Jewell. Working with Johnson always meant jumping to it. The sooner a guy came to terms with that, the better everyone got along. Peterson didn't mind Sunshine's most demanding boss. Despite Johnson's hard-ass persona, Peterson respected the shaft foreman because he knew his business.

10:45
A.M.,
M
AY
2
Underground

S
AFETY ENGINEER
B
OB
L
AUNHARDT FINISHED HIS MORNING ROUNDS
at about
the same time brusque Gene Johnson left his two cage tenders. Launhardt felt good. He liked going underground, the daily reminder that there was directness and simplicity to metal mining. If his old man, a farmer, could see the tangible world of mining, Launhardt believed he'd completely understand the appeal and the simplicity. If crops failed, there was no money.

Growing up on a farm during the Dust Bowl years in Collinsville, Illinois, Bob Launhardt was one of five born to a taskmaster father and a sickly and sometimes emotionally chilly mother. Both parents were strict, remote, and deeply religious. Launhardt would later reason that they were only products of their own German Lutheran upbringing, one that drummed into their psyches a work ethic that made no allowance for the extras, like nurturing children. It was just as well. The Depression years were not for merrymaking, anyway. But in all fairness, his mother and father occasionally exhibited a kinder side. Bob's dad taught him to drive a tractor at six, and a car at nine. His mother was a terrific cook; her angel food cakes nudged the clouds.

For more than three years a field-cracking drought and coughing wind mowed over struggling crops, and the family's cash reserves dwindled to next to nothing. Praying for rain was an exercise in futility, but it was practiced daily. Chickens died and window ledges were covered with a traceable film of dust and poultry feathers. Launhardt's mother's asthma worsened during those years, but there was no real treatment besides confinement to an oxygen tent. The pressure exacerbated his father's remote nature, until it turned his anger outward. He repeatedly told Bob and his older brother that they were “not worth their salt,” words that would echo in Bob Launhardt's mind for the rest of his life. Nothing he could do would make his father happy. Launhardt left home at seventeen and enrolled in a Lutheran prep school and seminary college in Missouri, with plans to be a minister. His future was his own plan, a personal road map that called for discipline with caring. His plan was on course until his uncle Bill, a gold prospector who had seen the country from Alaska to California, made an offer of a summer job in Idaho. That changed everything.

T
HE
T
ALACHE
M
INING
C
OMPANY IN
A
TLANTA,
I
DAHO,
WAS IN ITS
declining years when Bob Launhardt, then nineteen, arrived to shatter rock in the summer of 1951. In its heyday, decades before, the Talache was the largest gold producer in the state—and one of the best gold mines in the country. It was located in a remote spot in the mountains along the middle fork of the Boise River. The little camp swelled and shrank over the years, following the availability of ore, the advances of metal recovery techniques, and the switch from donkeys to machines. Launhardt's first three days on the job were spent shoveling fallen rock from an exploration drift into a muck car and depositing the worthless load in the waste dump. Not exciting, but decent work. After each night's rest, Launhardt returned to find as much muck in his working area as had been there before his shift the previous day. It was mystifying. Finally, someone copped to the reason. They'd been working in a place of “rotten ground” where the rock above the timbers was so fractured that it rained pebble- and marble-sized pieces all night long. Sometimes bigger pieces, two hundred pounds or more, dropped, too. It certainly wasn't the safest job, but Launhardt was young and not one to complain, anyway. His next assignment there was no better. The Talache foreman had the lanky young man drilling and loading old—and volatile—gelatin dynamite into a new raise. He didn't offer any training, just a quick send-off.

“Here's your buzzy,” he said, indicating a 104 Gardner-Denver drill with a telescoping leg that gave it its other nickname, jackleg. “Here's your drill steel. We'll bring you some powder this afternoon.”

The foreman, with big, leathery catcher's-glove hands, pointed to the back of a darkened stope and told Launhardt to get busy.

“Just start drilling, son.”

No mention of the importance of safety was offered. Just the command to get going.

The Illinois teen worked alone, drilling, blasting, and running the raise like some goddamn movie miner. When timbering, he'd lower a rope to track level and an unseen helper would tie on a five-foot timber and Launhardt would haul it up. He'd set it above two posts and wedge it into place. The pressure of the rock—quite literally the weight of the world—held it in place. No spikes were used at the Talache. Wedges of wood were shimmed into cracks and along pressure points to ensure a snug fit. It was only the grace of God and the work of men that kept mines like the Talache from collapsing.

Back then, Launhardt earned a passable $10.25 a day and rented a house for $10 a month. Electricity set him back $20—the cost of mining in a remote place and being at the mercy of those who made a living off miners. With his mother in a hospital oxygen tent with asthma, Launhardt sent most of his paychecks back home. He didn't need money, anyway. For a mining town, the place was surprisingly straitlaced and quiet. He made a few good friends, including a father-and-son team, Delbert and Duwain Crow. That fall he returned to Illinois for his second year in seminary and was assigned to his home parish. He soon realized the politics of running a church was not to his liking. He was a solitary figure, a man who didn't want to be enmeshed in consensus-building. He figured he'd serve in the Army and figure out his life. Launhardt notified the draft board only to find the Army wouldn't take him—he was legally blind in one eye. His uncle's words, which couldn't have made sense without the experience at the Talache, took hold.
Mining gets into your blood. No one knows why, but it does.
Tall, skinny, and excited by the adventure, Launhardt drove his '48 Chevy west, and when he hit Kellogg, he knew he'd made it home. He moved into the Crows' little house, two blocks from the post office. His first day at Sunshine was March 13, 1954. He started at the bottom, earning $13.70 a day.

Around that time, Sunshine was in the throes of a fight with the miner's union. The tradition of union and management unrest and distrust, in fact, was deep and bloody in the Coeur D'Alenes. North Idaho had been the site of some of the most brutal and divisive labor uprisings in American history. For a decade prior to the turn of the last century, the Coeur d'Alene Mining Wars had drenched the district in miners' blood. Miners wanted a bigger piece of the stake that was making mine owners rich. They traded their picks for rifles, hijacked trains, and bombed Bunker Hill's mill. But of all district mines during recent history, Sunshine probably saw the most discord between labor and management.

Since the 1950s the feds were convinced that communists ran the unions, and that Sunshine, in particular, was a hotbed of commies. Sunshine job applications required new hires to disclose whether they were affiliated with the Communist Party. When Launhardt was a new hire, there was talk among some of the men that he was an FBI plant who'd come to get the goods on the miners and their potentially subversive activities.

Once he was better known and trusted, a fellow pulled him aside.

“You just don't fit in here,” he said. “In a way, you're lucky to be alive. You're lucky someone didn't throw you down the shaft.”

Launhardt shrugged it off. He felt luckier for another reason. He'd found the woman he'd marry.

W
HEN
J
ANET
N
OYEN WAS SEVEN, HER PARENTS,
B
ILL AND
H
AZEL
Noyen, purchased the Wayside Grocery on Smelterville's main drag. It was 1946, and the town was in its heyday, with a movie theater, another market, a drugstore and soda fountain, car dealerships, and a nice little public park where kids could swing. Smelterville was packed with the kids of miners and loggers. It was a place where splashing in the milky water of Lead Creek—the runoff from tailings left by Bunker Hill and other district operators—came with a warning. Kids were admonished to rinse off after a swim and never to drink the water. But no one was afraid to play in it. In the beginning, Launhardt fretted over the green metallic finish of his car, a Chrysler convertible. Every now and then, acid rain would pelt Smelterville and Kellogg, mottling the paint on cars. Launhardt saw how others just accepted the air quality and the problems born of living in an industrial area trapped in a valley. Smelter smoke was an irritant to the upper respiratory system and bronchial tubes, but as far as anyone knew, it wouldn't kill people. Livestock, maybe.

Tall, blond, and very pretty, Janet Noyen certainly wasn't the first high school girl to have a crush on an older man. Launhardt was seven years her senior, a man with a steady job at Sunshine
and
a convertible with Scotch plaid upholstery. They met at the American Lutheran Church in Kellogg, where he was Luther League adviser. Handsome and brainy, Launhardt was the kind of man who listened and processed his words before offering an opinion. They married on September 2, 1956, and moved into one of the rental houses that barnacled the route to the mine. Not long afterwards, the Launhardts bought a house at the apex of an invisible triangle that ran between the two most important buildings in the community—the Sunshine Mine manager's house and the Big Creek Store. The community also included Sunshine housing, a neighborhood of forty-two company-owned residences, most of which were three bedrooms (“built for families”) with appliances that included an electric range, a hot water heater, and a floor furnace. Sunshine leased the houses by the year, with rents averaging around $45 a month. By far the most extravagant of Big Creek's residences was the mine manager's mansion, a big white colonial built by the company in 1935. It had a maid's quarters, a kitchen with a paneled dining room, and a drawing room that always smelled of cigars and whiskey. Miners dubbed it “the guest house” because no one stayed there long.